Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Kat Purcell

An interview with Kat Purcell, a white (irish famine diaspora) non-binary trans performer, lighting designer, installation artist, producer, director, and street activist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time of this interview, they were a Q-STAGE Fellow with 20% Theatre Company, a Twin Cities company promoting experimental work by women and queer and trans theatre artists. Purcell is the founder of the Lightning Rod annual intensive and Artistic Co-Director of the Lightning Rod company with Marcela Michelle and Keila Anali Saucedo. Lightning Rod is a trans-led arts organism dedicated to Legacy, Development and Opportunity for queer and trans artists / activists. Along with Jay Apollo Simmons, they also founded the Studio he(ART)h Project, which serves as a warming station for unhoused Twin Cities artists. Purcell focuses much of their political energy around issues of housing insecurity and prison abolition. In this oral history interview with Macalester College students Rachel Warshaw and Pierce Hastings, Purcell discusses their upbringing in Connecticut and working-class identity, multifaceted technical and performing skillsets, their work with Lightning Rod and queer and trans theater in the Twin Cities generally, the Studio he(ART)h project, and their abolitionist and leftist politics. Specifically, they discuss the impact of police and military presence in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 on unhoused people, the Sheraton and Powderhorn encampments and how they led to the creation of the Studio he(ART)h project, and the loss of queer and trans arts spaces in the Twin Cities in the years before the pandemic.