Kristi Papailler
 
     
     
 

About Kristi

Kristi Papailler is the Co-Founder of Juneteenth Legacy Theatre.  Kristi is an actor, director, theater educator, producer and stage manager.  She has held managerial and educational positions with Actors Theater of Louisville, Stage One, The Louisville Children’s Theater and is currently the co-chair of the drama department at the Sacred Heart School for the Arts.

Kristi has appeared in JLT’s productions of: Diana Sands, August in June, Snow, The Diva Daughter’s Dupree, Passing Ceremonies, The Blue Vein Society, A Collective Piss and the Devil’s Beating His Wife and The Carelessness of Love.  Kristi directed JLT’s 2008 Juneteenth Blues Cabaret and August in June for the 2008-2009 BOLD JOURNEYS Tour.  Other JLT directing credits include: Sweetwater, The Last Dust Track, Kindler Genter Nation and Serving Two Masters.  She has also appeared in numerous staged readings at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, NC.

Ms. Papailler’s regional theater credits include: Christmas Belles, Dracula and To Kill a Mockingbird at Kentucky Repertory theater.  She appeared as Irma Slocum in Stage One’s production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and directed the company’s staged reading of Misfit Christmas. Kristi played Callie and Annie in Pandora Productions of Stop Kiss and Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, respectively. At Sacred Heart School for the Arts, Kristi has directed Who Pushed Humpty, The Brother’s Grimm, Out of Order, Dracula, Stone Soup and Three Billy Goats Gruff and Beowulf. She is also the production stage manager for Louisville’s World Fest with Ken Clay and Associates. 

Kristi’s commitment to theater for social change led to her creation of JLT’s Emancipate and Empower program which offers students and adults real life solutions to oppression through dramatic expression.  She is also the creator of Sacred Heart School for the Arts and Nativity Academy’s Drama Change Exchange Camp.  This two week intensive uses Theater of the Oppressed, Viewpoints and Improvisational techniques to address social justice issues with middle school students.  Kristi is a teaching artist with Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and The Kentucky Center for the Arts.

Kristi has a BA in Humanities with a concentration in the interdisciplinary studies of Theater and Literature and a minor in African American Theater from the University of Louisville.  She studied Viewpoints and Suzuki with New York City’s SITI Co.  She studied Theatre of the Oppressed techniques with Chethan Talwalkar.