Katie Mitchell

Katie Mitchell was born in Reading, Berkshire, raised in Hermitage, Berkshire, and educated at Oakham School. Upon leaving Oakham, she went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read English. She began her career behind the scenes at the King's Head Theatre in London before taking on work as an assistant director at theatre companies including Paines Plough (1987) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) (1988–1989). Early in her career in the 1990s, she directed five early productions under the umbrella of her company Classics On A Shoestring, including Women of Troy for which she won a Time Out Award. In 1989, she was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to study director's training in Russian, Georgia, Lithuania and Poland and the work she saw there, including productions by Lev Dodin, Eimuntas Nekrosius and Anatoly Vasiliev, influenced her own practice for the next twenty years.