About
Katherine Koller lives in Edmonton, Alberta, and writes for stage (theatre, ballet, opera and dance), screen and radio, and for the page (short and longform fiction and nonfiction and poetry).
Some of her full-length plays concern the pressure of science and technology on family relationships, often with the land or some element of nature playing a character part. Some are set in history to give meaning to present-day events. Her trilogy of Alberta Landworks Plays are about coal, agriculture and oil in Alberta, each at the point of great change. Coal Valley: The Making of a Miner was commissioned and produced in Drumheller in 2005 and is included in The Alberta Advantage (Playwrights Canada Press, 2008). The Seed Savers received its premiere at Workshop West Theatre in 2009 and was produced at the Station Arts Centre in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, in 2010, and is in Voices of the Land: The Seed Savers and Other Plays (Athabasca University Press, 2012). A play about the oil and water of a young marriage during the 1947 Leduc oil discovery, Last Chance Leduc won the 2013 Alberta Playwriting Competition and was a Finalist in the 2015 Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition. It was produced at Grande Prairie Regional College in 2015 and received its professional premiere at the Backstage Theatre, Fringe Theatre Adventures in 2018.
Katherine’s one-act comedies have been produced at the Edmonton Fringe Festival, CBC radio, Jagged Edge Lunchbox Theatre, Winnipeg‘s FemFest, Alumnae Theatre and Women at Play(s) in Toronto and SkirtsAfire Festival and Walterdale Playhouse in Edmonton, and have been invited to festivals in the U.K. and the U.S. She has also written several short plays on the topic of health ethics, now collected into Healthy Ethics: Plays for Healthcare Teams.
Dance projects include story ballets for Citie Ballet (Murder at the Strand, Ariadne’s Gate, Damsels of the Night and Cave Beat) and libretto for Heart of Darkness for Theatre Encounter in Calgary. Short operas for Tapestry New Opera are She is Me, Where is Ava? and Wash the Loss Away. Benton Roark is composer for the chamber opera in development, The Handless Maiden, which received both an excerpted staged reading at Vancouver Opera Spring Festival and a full orchestral reading in Vancouver at #indieopera in 2019.
Her six-part web documentary, Sustainable Me, about Edmonton youth changing their world, is online at www.sustainablemeyeg.ca. A second season on Water is in development. Other films with Company of Women on the Screen include Taking Flight, SafEdmonton and Getting Out, Getting Safe. Plays for CBC radio include Cowboy Boots and a Corsage and Magpie.
Katherine’s first novel, Art Lessons, was published by Great Plains in 2016 and was a Finalist for the Robert Kroestch Edmonton Book Prize and the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Alberta Views, Grain, Room, LitSphere, Edify, The Fiddlehead and Epiphany and in anthologies Very Much Alive, Life of Pie, Polish(ed) and Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia. Winning Chance, her collection of short stories, published in 2019 by Great Plains, won the Exporting Alberta Award from Canadian Authors Association and a High Plains Book Award. A second book of short stories by Katherine Koller, Earthen, is upcoming in spring of 2026.
Poetry by Katherine Koller has appeared in Prairie Journal, Funicular, Happiness Reflected, Northword, FIre in the Heart, and online at Poetry Pause. Creative nonfiction has been published in Prairie Journal, The Pandemic and Me, Westword and upcoming in Please Don’t Interrupt.
Hope Soup, a radio play, was recorded at the Edmonton Fringe in 2019. Riverkeeper was a Finalist in the Jane Chambers Award in 2020, the Alberta Playwriting Competition in 2021, the Judith Royer Playwriting Prise in 2022 and the Theatre BC Canadian National Playwriting Competition in 2024. Cowboy Boots and a Mustang (feature film) is in development. Her latest play, with music by her brother George Koller, is an audio play about the power of music, The Percussionist.
Katherine is also a contributor to Edmonton City as Museum Project (ECAMP) online, a former Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and founding co-producer of Edmonton’s Script Salon, a monthly new play reading series since 2014. She was a member of the Citadel Playwrights’ Lab from 2023-25, working on Persuasion, an adaptation of the novel by Jane Austen, which was read at Collider Festival in 2025.