Katja Handt

Set and Costume Design

Created by the Strangeways Ensemble for Merrigong Theatre Company.

The Seven takes a witty approach to horror and conspiracy tropes, exploring notions of visibility and the unknown.

Director: Anne-Louise Rentell

Lighting Design: Jasmine Rizk

Sound design: Daryl Wallis

Photographs by Tracey Leigh

COSTUME DESIGN

nominated for BEST COSTUME DESIGN in live performance APDG awards 2024

This Midsummer Nights Dream by Merrigong Theatre Company was set against the stunning backdrop of the Wollongong Botanical Gardens.

The design was a fun blend of Australian popular culture, botanicals and referenced classic Elizabethan silhouettes.

Director: Leland Kean

Adaptation: Danielle King

Lighting: Jasmine Rizk

Photography: Tracey Leigh

Illustration: Katja Handt

Set and Costume Design

This sensory journey into the imagination produced by ArtsOutWest at BMEC in Bathurst is about an adventurous, tough and sassy girl who lives with disabilities.

Writer/ Director: Catherine McNamara

Associate Director: Anne-Louise Rentell

Producer: Kate Smith

Digital Artist: Matthew Hughes

Lighting Design: Becky Russell

Set and Costume Design

In development with Box of Birds/ Stalker Theatre, most recently presented as work in progress at APAM 2026 Perth.

Photos shot by Lisa Haymes at creative development Presentation Carriageworks 2023.

Creative Team:

Boris Bagattni - animating consultant

Margie Breen - co-director

James Brown- composer

Shakira Clanton - writer and performer

David Clarkson - co-director

Matt Hughes - digital designer

Sam James - digital artist

Lee-Anne Litton - aerial dance and choreography

Jordan O'Davis - dance and aerials

Alejandro Rolandi - rigging design and rigger

Nathalia Henao Rodriguez - dance Intern

Mike Smith - lighting designer and production manager

Ursula Yovich - mentoring artist

COSTUME DESIGN

The Sirens’ Return was a site specific evocative new music theatre work set against the glorious backdrop of Port Kembla beach (industrial suburb of Wollongong), produced by Merrigong Theatre Company and The Society of Histrionic Happenings.

The production created a powerful, dreamlike space in which the siren and her song was a powerful metaphor for the evocative pull of women’s histories.

Written by Barbara Nicholson and Ali Jane Smith

Concept/Director: Anne-Louise Rentell

Composer/Musical Director: Daryl Wallis

Photographs: Jeremy Park

PRODUCTION DESIGN

New Australian musical comedy by Drew Fairley, inspired by the actor and playwrights own real-life experiences being marooned on a cruise ship during the early months of the pandemic. It's the odyssey of a man drumming up mirth while he grips onto the edge of a funnel that threatens to plunge him into the abyss.

Written by Drew Fairley

Directed by Leland Kean

Lighting design by Peter Rubie

COSTUME DESIGN assisted by Claire Westwood

INNER GARDEN was a performance installation by acclaimed dance company De Quincey Co at Rozelle's Callan Park. It drew on the history of the site to delve into the imagination. Curled up in a high window or inhabiting nooks and crannies, the dancers folded in and around the site exploring the crevices of the mind and the shape of our obsessions.

The costumes reflected individual obsessions and were inspired by materials found around the site.

Concept and direction by Tess de Quincey.

Lighting by Sian James-Holland

Drawings by Katja Handt.

COSTUME DESIGN

Shipwreck Odyssey was produced by Box of Birds and first presented at the Australian National Maritime Museum as part of 2023 Sydney Festival.

Part theatre show - part play space immersive installation, Shipwreck Odyssey combined live storytelling and performance with a state-of-the-art responsive projection playscape- inviting audiences to come alive to their love for our blue planet.

Audiences traveled beneath the turquoise waves and coral cays of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef as the ghost ship Jenny Lind (and the ship’s figure head) lead them on an adventure into the wild wonders and mysteries of our oceans.

The costume design focused on silhouette and costumes were heavily art finished.

Production stills by Cassandra Hannagan

SET AND COSTUME DESIGN

What are you doing right now? Yeah you.  What are you doing at this moment, for real?  Are you on your way somewhere? Maybe you are reading this whilst waiting for someone to arrive? Maybe you are at work with the mouse hovering over the minimise icon? Maybe you are in the future. You are looking for something online but stumbled upon this?

If October 2016 has been and gone then sorry you are too late, the show has already passed.  

Most probably reading this right now is you in the process of doing something else. That’s what this show was about.

Do Something Else was a seriously playful inquiry into life’s little distractions. 

Flightpath Theatre Production, Old 505 Theatre Newtown

Devised by Michael Pigott
Devisors / Cast: Cloé Fournier, Ryuichi Fujimura, Brigid Vidler

Photographs by Michael Pigott

Co-Creator/ Scenographer

Work in Development

In 2019 In Transit Co as part of the Merrigong X program turned the Wollongong Town Hall into an international airport. Alongside a core team of artists and in collaboration with the Illawarra Multicultural Service we invited audiences to a performance that was at the same time a community conversation on the topics of departures, arrivals and belongings.

To be continued.

Set and Costume Design

Trash Talk was Katja’s second collaboration with the Strangeways Ensemble at Merrigong Theatre. It explored justice in the workplace for people working in Australian Disability Enterprises. Devised with director Anne-Louise Rentell, and drawing on a hyper-real aesthetic inspired by professional wrestling, Trash Talk takes a gladiatorial approach to human rights and our universal desire for respect and dignity. An unflinching start to the Merrigong 2020 Season, the work also toured to Riverside Theatres, Parramatta in February.

Devised by Anne Louise Rentell and the Ensemble

AV Design: Sean Bacon

Lighting: Taryn Brown

Photography: Lisa Tomasetti

Costume Design

The Subtle Beings was part a performance installation by WeiZen Ho as a result of two years of travel in Asia to research and witness rituals in Sabah and Hanoi, rituals which are connected to her own cultural heritage.

The costume became an inspiring source of collaboration between artist and costume designer which is ongoing and will see a further development in the future.

Photos: Vsevolod Vlaskine

Set and Costume Design

Produced by AXIS and Quiet Riot

Mechanical Mayhem is a riotous circus clowning show for kids. This slapstick performance showcases a variety of circus acts, each interconnected through an overarching narrative, with a fundamental meaning to impart. The performance takes place in a futuristic, steampunk lab where a wacky inventor is working on her latest invention. One of her cheeky assistants accidentally destroys her work. Frustrated, she builds a new helper out of the materials strewn about her. Throughout the high jinx that ensues, the inventor learns the value of people.

Written and directed by Zebastian Hunter

Lighting Design by Alexander Berlage

Photos: Simone Coleman

SET AND COSTUME DESIGN

Commissioned and developed by Merrigong Theatre Company, Lachlan Philpott’s Lost Boys centres on Cy and Robert Murphy, teenagers living a life of sun and saltwater.

But as the sun sets, a malevolent culture of homophobia and violence surfaces, with consequences that ripple across generations.

Inspired by real events and told through the eyes of three generations of the Murphy family, Lost Boys exposes the dark part of our male-dominated culture, asking how perpetrators of violent crimes live with their unspeakable pasts.

Directed by Leland Kean

AV Design by Mic Gruchy

Lighting Design by Jasmine Rizk

Photographs by Zakarij Zaczmarek

COSTUME DESIGN for De Quincey Co as part of You're History! 2013

presented by Performance Space

Fusing Anne Ferran’s acclaimed photographic trilogy of 1940’s psychiatric patients (INSULA: 1-38: Box of Birds – exhibition) with a live dance installation at Sydney's Carriageworks, BOX OF BIRDS conjured a labyrinth-like domain where other-worldly fashion and immersive sound design intertwined with movement and select audio visual readings of the legendary German philosopher, Frederich Nietzsche.

Performance Direction by Tess de Quincey

Lighting by Sian James-Holland

Costumes were sculpted with existing felt objects by Anne Ferran.

Photos by Heidrun Lohr.

COSTUME DESIGN

Funny and poignant, Harvey Fierstein’s intensely personal collection of three plays chronicles a Jewish New York drag-queen’s quest for love, respect and a life of which he can be proud. Set in 1976, 79 and 1982.

Produced by Darlinghurst Theatre Company

Directed by Stephen Colyer

Set Design by Imogen Ross

Lighting Design by Ben Brockman

Photo credit: Clare Hawley

SET AND COSTUME DESIGN

In PROJETTO MATHILDE a woman waits. She recounts her life.

Her story is inspired by the lifes of Amelia Earhart, Saint Hildegard von Bingen, a suicide bomber, a young widow, and, finally, by the story of an Italian soldier. 

MATHILDE was a one woman show developed in Bolzano Italy in coproduction with Theatro di Documenti Rome.

Directed by Tanya Denny

Performed by Monica Trettel

Photos by Katja Handt

SET AND COSTUME DESIGN

Merrigong Theatre Company

At The Sweet Wrapper Club club love didn't promise a happy ending. There was no walking hand-in-hand on a beach in the glow of a glorious sunset. This club was a world of dream vampires, lonely catbirds, bearded clowns, and hibernating bears. Set and costumes were placed firmly in a magic realism world inspired by David Lynch.

Devised by Anne-Louise Rentell, Daryl Wallis and the Strangeways Ensemble

Lighting design by Verity Hampson

photos by Lisa Tomasetti

COSTUME AND PROPS DESIGN for Performance Installation,

assisted by Kirsten Hughes

Working from real stories of lost toys, Shopfront Theatre created a guerilla exhibition of posters in cafes throughout Sydney, wrote and produced over twenty original songs and sound pieces, turned simple drawings into giant three dimensional glowing sculptures and created performances bringing together the extended Shopfront company on the streets of Hurstville - in a joyous celebration of what it is to lose things and to find them again.

Costumes were inspired by toys and David Lynch and ranged from pink teddy bears to real transformer car/robots.

Directed by TJ Eckleberg

Lighting by Stephen Hawker

Photos by Jarra McGrath

SET AND COSTUME DESIGN

Merrigong Theatre Company

The feel-good stage adaptation of Tim Baker’s gorgeous children’s book follows the tale of a young surfer on a magical underwater journey. Captured by a mermaid, the boy is led to the depths of the ocean to meet her marine friends – the whales.

To support the strong message of the book about the human impact on our oceans the set was partially build out of recycled materials featuring a coral reef made entirely out of recycled plastic bottles.

Directed by Leland Kean

AV by Mic Gruchy, featuring photography by Ted Grambeau

Lighting by Taryn Brown

SET, COSTUME and PUPPET DESIGN

assisted by Iris Holstein

Downstairs Belvoir

"Lector, intende: laetaberis – Lend me your ear, reader: you shall enjoy yourself" – the closing words of the prologue from Lucius Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.
This production spanned over three acts each lasting almost an hour, featured 72 characters played out by only seven actors and was performed in the Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre.

"Designer Katja Handt takes line honours in the creative stakes. She has devised ingenious ways to use and extend the Downstairs space, while the amusing costumes - integrated only by colour range in beige-bronze and ruddy tans - are excellent. " Diana Simmons, Stagenoise

Directed by Michael Pigott

Lighting by Stephen Hawker

Produced by Sam Hawker

Drawings by Katja Handt. 

SET AND COSTUME DESIGN

Early evening. Autumn 1954. In a house beside the Nepean River a young woman is crying. Iris is chopping onions while Leo cooks the wild mushrooms he picked that morning. Iris is growing up at the foot of the Blue Mountains. Leo is making a new life for himself after fleeing war-ravaged Europe.

Inspired by the history of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest.

Produced by QTheatre Penrith

Directed by Nick Atkins

Lighting by Benjamin Turner

EXHIBITION DESIGN/ INSTALLATION ARTIST

Australian Museum of Democracy, Old Parliament House Canberra

Collaboration with MOD Productions

Power of 1: Does your voice count? is an ambitious cross platform project that celebrates the spirit of Australian democracy and the power of individual voice. It includes a physical exhibition, art installations, a national baseline survey, live online interactive activities, tangible data visualisation, social media and good old fashioned debate to create a unique interactive experience.

https://vimeo.com/146060964

Unharmed is Katja’s ongoing research into the nature of sculptural costume in the context of expanded scenography.

As a scenographer, she has always been drawn to projects evolving from the complexity of everyday life and our struggle to find a place in it.  This eventually led to a strong desire to visually unravel, extricate and show hidden facets of people outside a traditional theatrical context.

 This practice led research investigates the intricate suits of armour we create in our everyday life battles and, by making them visible, examines the exact transition point between reality and performance and the role of costume in that transition.

She has begun experimenting with chainmail, knotted from recycled plastic bags and beads handmade from recycled tin. Strong to the touch but essentially a fraud object, as the plastic string dissolves in high temperatures. Work in progress.

COSTUME FABRICATION

Costume making has always been part of Katja’s work and since coming to Australia she has specialised in costume props.

She is endlessly fascinated by the challenge of taking raw materials and engineering them into something wearable; an accessory or full costume.

Her roles in the Australian costume industry include Head of Costume Props (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), Head of Leather (Fury Road), and costume props for The Lion King, Priscilla, The Asian Games and many other productions.