Janielle Kastner makes stories happen, whether she’s writing a play for a theatre, scripting audio for your ears, or devising an experiment in an abandoned location — her medium is anything with words. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Dallas, Texas.
AT THE MOMENT SHE IS
Breaking ground on a new podcast about Evangelicalism and American Culture.
Working on a new play commission from Dallas Theatre Center about storytellers trying to tell the story of Kitty Genovese’s infamous 1963 murder.
Exploring the grieving process via the creative process in her meta-narrative memoir podcast Untitled Dad Project (IndieWire’s #1 Best Episode of 2019).
BIO
Janielle Kastner is a writer and performer based in Brooklyn, NY from Dallas, TX whose words take the form of live theatrical plays, large-scale art installations on buildings, interactive PowerPoints in bookstores, performance pieces on bar patios, and podcasts in the intimacy of your headphones.
She’s currently working on a new play commission from Dallas Theater Center (HERE KITTY KITTY), where she was an inaugural member of the Dallas Playwrights Workshop with Will Power. Her most recent inside-out Antigone adaptations (ANNE-TIG-UH-KNEE) premiered at Second Thought Theatre in 2023, where her play SWEETPEA (birthed on the silent Stillwrights writers retreat with Erik Ehn, making silent eye contact with animals) recently had its delayed world premiere in 2021.
Pre-pandemic in March of 2020, she and co-writer Brigham Mosley premiered PLAYWRIGHTS IN THE NEWSROOM, a “theatrical audit” based on 3 years spent shadowing The Dallas Morning News (North Texas’ last remaining legacy newspaper) in the AT&T Performing Art Center’s Elevator Project. Together, Mosley and Kastner sought to explore the links between journalism and democracy, disarm, engage and make the most of their ferociously bipartisan audience in Dallas, while doing justice to the real people who talked to them while wearing sweaters and pouring coffee and trying to tell the Truth.
For most of 2019, instead of writing a play, she was in a podcast studio pretending she was telling a story when really she was learning how to grieve. The result is her autofiction/meta-narrative podcast Untitled Dad Project, which spans five years of the grieving process by way of 10 episodes on story. Untitled Dad Project was selected as #1 on IndieWire’s Top 50 list “Best Podcast Episodes of 2019”, and has made her a vocal advocate for those experiencing disenfranchised grief - something most of us are experiencing right now in one form or another.
She’s also the Executive Producer of other award-winning audio such as Billie Was a Black Woman (2022 The Podcast Academy Ambies Award Winner; 2021 NY Festival Radio Awards, Bronze Medal), The Grand Scheme: Snatching Sinatra (2022 Webby Award Winner), and a podcast currently in production with Paramount Pictures.
Other plays include FEED ME (the aftermath of tragedy through the lens of an asshole cat), OPHELIA UNDERWATER (exactly what it sounds like, but more fun), and HEAVEN’S GATES, HELL’S FLAMES (a play about a nondenominational church putting on a play). She was a recipient of the Dallas Observer’s “Mastermind Award” for co-founding arts incubation group The Tribe, and was named “Best New Playwright” in the Dallas Observer’s 2016 Best of Dallas issue.
You may explore more of her work here.
You may tread lightly through her brain space here.
You may send your tenderest thoughts to: janiellekastner@gmail.com.