Born at the turn of the millennium and hailing from a post-industrial city in the North-East of Scotland, Mackenna (they/she) 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, lighting designer, scenographer and musician.
Believing that the human species in its current form is doomed to end in the near future, Mackenna 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, Mackenna’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 Mackenna’s work.
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, dancing on the ruins of a rotten way of life.
Light, space and sound play a crucial role in Mackenna’s work. They are heavily inspired by musical styles such as noise, drone, industrial, 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.
Mackenna is currently focussed on a series of works exploring the crimes of the future, with specific fascination for genocide and violence, viewed from an explicitly hauntological and intersectional perspective, at the cross-section between emotion, morality and sociology.
From 2021 to 2026, Mackenna was Artist in Residence at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam.
Mackenna is a lecturer and tutor at the BA Theatre Directing course of the Academy for Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam.