Background Statement
The Catamounts were founded in 2011 by Amanda and Ben Berg Wilson in order to bring to Colorado the adventurous, multi-disciplinary aesthetic and arts education methodology they had developed with success over a decade working in Chicago. In the company’s inaugural year, company member Lauren Shepard added a third program in which "farm-style" dinners are accompanied by performances. Known as FEED, this singular program established itself alongside regional premiere productions of bold new plays and education programs in which Catamount professionals lead young artists in creating and performing their own work.
In 2017, The Catamounts expanded to producing immersive works such as 2017’s nine-time Henry-nominated Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage and 2018’s Rausch, Henry-nominated for Best New Play and winner of a 2018 True West award.
At the onset of the pandemic, The Catamounts turned to their mission which states they are “dedicated to the reinvention of artistic forms,” and continued to hone their site-specific, immersive identity in COVID-safe productions such as 2020’s The Rough, a piece staged on a golf course which audiences experienced socially distanced in golf carts, and the 2021 True West award-winning Land of Milk and Honey, a living history of Shoenberg Farm. This evolution has also included developing more world-premiere work by Colorado playwrights: 2021’s One Way-Back Day, an original adaptation of Black American folklore created by a BIPOC team of writers; 2023’s FEED: Après and FEED: Plant, whose short works are by a diverse team of Colorado authors; and Pride of the Farm, an immersive exploration of social and environmental justice on the historic Metzger Farm by Colorado playwright Jeffrey Neuman. The company's 2023-24 season was entirely authored by Colorado playwrights.
The company’s professional work now focuses on world-premiere works by Colorado authors staged immersively and/or site-specifically, and educational programs on developing original work with young artists.
The Catamounts enter their fourteenth season as a premiere innovator of performance in the state, having produced 32 regional or world-premiere, boundary-pushing productions, 28 FEED events, and serving annually in educational residencies at local elementary schools and summer camps.