MHÀIRI MACKENNA
DIRECTION / SPACE / LIGHT / SOUND

CREATIONS
MINOR DETAIL
4.48 PSYCHOSIS
ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE
REGRESSIE
ZUCHT
HAUNTOLOGY
KATIE CRUEL
LENZ
SHEATH AND KNIFE
CRAVE

MUSIC AND SOUND WORKS
CORPSE DRESSER

INFO
ABOUT
AGENDA
CV
CONTACT

ABOUT

Born at the turn of the millennium and hailing from a post-industrial city in the North-East of Scotland, Mhàiri Mackenna dedicates their work to the intersectional exploration of outsiders in society, and giving voice and form to their lives and struggles. Mackenna’s main practices are those of a theatre director, scenographer, lighting designer, musician, sound designer and playwright. 

Believing that the human species in its current form is doomed to destroy itself in the near future, Mhàiri works to develop a body of work that contributes to a modern mythology of our contemporary, poisoned world. Dancing on the borders between truth and fiction, Mhàiri’s work combines sociological analysis, nihilistic existentialism and radical idealism to give form to living portraits of scarred individuals living violent lives in secret. Forgotten pasts, hidden presents and lost futures are the backdrop for their lives, and how they transgress, resist and occasionally succumb to these environments forms the action and the anecdotes of Mhàiri work. The portraits of these outsiders are always broken, cracked, shattered, and it is in this twilight zone of dubious existence and morality that Mhàiri finds a deep and human truth for our contemporary world.

Considering themself an outsider in many ways, they operate in intersectional solidarity and with empathy towards others who identify with forms of outsiderness, and educate and engage those who have not been forced to the margins of contemporary society. Their work shows our species hurtling towards destruction, searching for relief and repair, screeching for liberation and dancing on the ruins of a rotten way of life. 

In regards to process, Mhàiri works to develop highly sensory theatrical experiences with equal attention to deeply emotional characters, visceral sonic and spacial experiences, and extreme moral and personal phenomena which challenge, move and discomfort audiences. Their sonic work is heavily inspired by musical styles such as noise, drone, metal and folk. Their work as a designer is highly influenced by the aesthetics and spaces of subcultures, and styles such as brutalism, post-industrialism, cult, digital culture, abandonment and ruin, conflict zones and rural aesthetics.

Mhàiri is currently focussed on a series of works exploring crimes of the future, with specific interest in genocide and violence, viewed from explicitly hauntological and intersectional perspectives. 

They are currently writing two texts for theatre: EXILES, an imagined future of the incoming international genocide towards transgender communities and the ways in which they resist and persevere, and HOSPITAL, a series of wordless theatrical images, portraying the ways in which widespread hyperviolence leads to collective societal psychosis, and the ways in which these phenomena manifest and fracture the life and mind of a transgender teenager in the 2030s.

From 2021 to 2026, Mhàiri was Artist in Residence at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam.

Mhàiri is a returning lecturer and tutor at the BA Theatre Directing course of the Academy for Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, teaching Direction and Design.