PROVIDENCE – A Needham, Mass., native who has spent the last seven years leading a performing arts festival in New York will come to Rhode Island to lead Trinity Repertory Company this fall.
The local theater group announced Tuesday that Kate Liberman has been named Trinity Rep’s new executive director, and will formally take over the role in September. Liberman will assume the director’s role currently held by Jennifer Canole, a 2022 Providence Business News Business Women Awards honoree who has been serving as interim executive director for the last six months.
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Tom Parrish, Trinity Rep’s former executive director, left for New York in October 2021.
Trinity Rep said Liberman has served as managing director of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in New York since 2015. In that time, Liberman helped expand the institution through increased revenue and improved operations. Liberman also led a strategic reopening as the first theater in New York State to restart in-person performances after the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered performance venues, Trinity Rep said.
Liberman, Trinity Rep said, also has experience serving with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in various capacities.
In a statement Tuesday, Liberman said she “could not be more thrilled and honored” to start her new venture at Trinity Rep. She said she long admired the theater group and its impact in “building local community and influencing the American regional theater field.”
“I cannot wait to bring my own energy and expertise to support Trinity Rep’s mission to reinvent the public square at a time when it is necessary to expand our approach to equity and sustainability while expanding access to our work,” Liberman said. “As our industry continues to reemerge, reinvention will be essential in ensuring that we can achieve this aspiration. I am overjoyed to join Trinity Rep in a transformational future.”
Curt Columbus, Trinity Rep’s artistic director, said in a statement Tuesday that Liberman brings a range of skills to her work as a theatrical producer and an institutional thinker, which he says are vital to the health and longevity to an organization.
“She shares our vision for how the theater’s work can reach beyond the limits of stage, even the building, to have a profound and lasting impact as a public square on Rhode Island and throughout southeastern New England,” Columbus said.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
