Kay Adshead is a writer, theatre maker, performer, filmmaker, and producer. She trained at RADA as an actress, winning the Emile Littler Award for Outstanding Talent. Leading roles in TV, film, and theatre include Cathy in the BBC classic serial Wuthering Heights, Linda in Mike Leigh’s Kiss of Death, Sue McKenna in Film on Four’s Acceptable Levels, Tanzi in Trafford Tanzi at the Mermaid, (learning to wrestle for the role.) She sung the role of Clara Twain in Adrian Mitchel’s White Suit Blues and played Betty in Stephen Lowe’s Touched, both productions at the Old Vic. She played Moll Gromer in Philip Martin’s Thee and Me at the RNT.
She has written over 25 plays, and has been published by Methuen, Faber and Faber, and Oberon, with commissions or productions at the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Young Vic, The Lyric Hammersmith( main House) The Cockpit, the Bush, the Arcola, Soho Theatre, and many more. Awards include Fringe First, Adelaide Fringe Sensation Award, Adelaide Best Fringe Performance Award, M.E.N. best Fringe Performance, Scene Savers Best Play 2023 for The Last little Girl, and she won a Houston Purposeful Artist Award for the same play. She has been a Susan Smith Blackburn finalist three times for Thatcher’s Women, The Bogus Woman, and Bites. She was nominated for an E.M.M.A and Encore Magazine best Play of the Year, for Animal. Alex Sierz of The Tribune describes her as” the great survivor”, and The Times reviewed her play I am Sad you are dead Mrs. T for Theatre503 as “a poetic mortar bomb.”
In 1999, with Lucinda Gane, she co-founded multi-award-winning theatre company Mama Quilla. She has devised and directed more than 10 large-cast experimental and live art, site-specific projects, often working within hard-to-reach communities creating empowering performance within vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.
Her experimental film bricolage Stormy – The Opera was a finalist in the 57 year old WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, an award winner in WRPN Women’s International Film Festival ,and won the Kudos Award 2023 in the Depth of Field International Film Festival. PANGOLIA, a film made from The Pangolin Project produced at the Alexandra Palace in 2022, won Best Experimental in the Miami Indie Film Awards and Madrid Art House Film Festival, Both films have been Official Selections over 15 times at international film festivals. She is currently editing a short film, Sea Glass, and has completed filming The Silent Lyre shot in Berlin.
Her short screenplay Teratoma is in development and so is a new full length play “ As yet untitled”
