Meet The Team

  • Artistic/Executive Director

    Catherine Rouvinov-Kats is a Chicago-based director and adaptor whose work centers on spatial experimentation, physical performance, and the relationship between actors, audience, and space. She is especially interested in how both classical and contemporary text can be reimagined through experimental approaches to staging and audience configuration.

    Her directing credits include Full Fathom Five (Logan Center), Stories (Athenaeum Center), Measure for Measure (Boston Center for the Arts), and Selkie Play (Out of the Blue Community Arts). Assistant Directing credits include A Case for the Existence of God (New Conservatory Theater Center) and The Rocky Horror Show (Central Square Theater).

    Catherine holds a BA in Theater Studies from Yale College and has also trained at the Eugene O'Neill Center. Her work is additionally informed by her interests in Yiddish (of which she is an advanced speaker), Jewish theatre history, and European modernism.

  • Development Lead

    Aaron Mesa (they/them) is a stage manager, theater enjoyer, and math major at Yale. They have stage managed 8 shows, two of which were through Cunning Folk (Neufaust and Selkie Play). In their free time they like to dance and read Science Fiction. 

  • Associate Artistic Director

    Lavanya Sinha (they/she) is a senior at Yale University studying literature and performance. A teacher and proponent of children’s theatre, which to them is theatre of care and community, they have found its spirit most closely mirrored in experimental theatrical projects like those of The Cunning Folk, with their mild-to-extreme anti-realism and whimsy. Lavanya acted in Selkie Play, the company’s first show, associate directed A Neufaust, and directed 2 ½ Lesbians this past summer.

  • Marketing Lead

    Zel Tracey (they/them, ze/hir) is a gothy, queer, Boston-born artist, madperson, and Capricorn always up to participate in the creation of something incredibl(e/y odd).

  • Resident Dramaturg

    Sam Fisher is a recent Yale graduate who deeply enjoys combining her loves of history, theology, lecturing people, and theater in the field of dramaturgy. Currently, she’s lecturing the members of Cunning Folk on the historical subtext of the theater they create from ten time zones away, where she teaches English at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh.