In 2018, Kelly Bartnik (NYC) and Kathleen Wessel (Atlanta) joined forces to create Combo Platter Productions, LLC; an Immersive Theater and large-scale event production company. Their collective talents and experience are the perfect combination to craft highly unique and engaging experiences.
Image by Mr. Wattson
KELLY BARTNIK is a NY-based choreographer, performer, director, teacher and producer. She was an original cast member of both the Boston and NY productions of Sleep No More, originating the role of Bald Witch. She has also had the pleasure of performing with Optika Moderna, Witness Relocation, Cora Dance, Cinereal, CakeFace (*Bessie Award Nominee), Melissa Briggs Dance, South Brooklyn Shakespeare, Woodshed Collective, Switch N Play, The Pack Theater and Shelter Theatre Group among others. She performed as an original cast member in the Immersive experience, Waking La Llorona, presented by the Old Globe Theater and La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Kelly also joined the cast of Independent Study at The Tank and continued her role as Nic in Sex Play with The Pack Theater at the New Ohio Theatre in NYC.
She performed in Jessica Clarke’s Communion (*Bessie Award) which was presented at HERE Arts Center and Bates Dance Festival among others.
Her own work has been presented at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange/BAX,
BRIC Studio, Dance Theater Workshop (formerly), Dixon Place, Joyce Soho,
Dogtown Dance Theater, James Madison University, Long Island University,
A rena Stage and The Publick Playhouse in Maryland. In 2019, she received an evening-length commission by Gibney Dance for the premiere of her work Fuck / Love: The Poetics of Adoration, with support from the Jerome Foundation.
She was Movement Director for the Immersive experience, Las Quinceaneras, as part of the Without Walls Festival presented by La Jolla Playhouse. She directed and consulted for immersive experiences for Meow Wolf, Santa Fe and co-wrote and co-directed a Jack Ryan Immersive Experience for Amazon Prime and Twitch.
She taught Movement for Actors at NYU’s Playwright’s Horizons for four years. She previously taught Advanced Movement at Sarah Lawrence College, Advanced Contemporary at Mark Morris Dance Center and was director of BAXCo, the teen repertory dance company at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She was guest faculty in residency at Colby College in 2019 to develop a new work that was presented at the Boston Center for the Arts.
She holds her MFA in Choreography & Visual Arts from Wilson College and was a founding member of GK1 Productions, a video production company that specialized in dance films.
In 2017, Kelly created the initial Immersive Theater Production of HERE in NYC. Two years later, she began collaborating with Kathleen to created the HEREafter series in Atlanta, as well as mounting the large-scale experiential gallery show, Home Training.
Currently, she is Resident Director of Hotel Wonderland: the first large-scale Immersive Theater show in the Netherlands.
KATHLEEN WESSEL is a movement artist, choreographer, director, scholar, writer, and educator from Orlando, Florida. She holds an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Florida State University and a BA in Psychology from Emory University where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Goodrich C. White Scholar. In 2007, she co-founded the Atlanta-based Staibdance and danced with the company for a decade. In addition, she served as the company's Managing Director and co-created the Staibdance Summer Intensive in Sorrento, Italy. For eight years she was faculty coordinator and a faculty member on the Italy Intensive. Kathleen has performed and taught throughout the American Southeast, Las Vegas, New York, Italy, and Sweden, and her movement studies have taken her to The Place in London, the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theater in Tel Aviv, and the B12 festival in Berlin most recently.
Currently, Kathleen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Dance Performance and Choreography at Spelman College where she teaches dance writing, theory, composition, and technique courses; she is also Director of Spelman Dance Theater and curates the department’s master class series Studio Sessions. From 2019-2020, Kathleen served as an associate Director and co-choreographer for The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project Presents: By Our Hands, an award-winning devised archives-to-performance production exploring the history of convict labor in Georgia. The production received an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Public History Project from the National Council on Public History in 2020. Most recently, Kathleen received two “Best of Theater: Choreography” awards from the Orlando Sentinel: in 2020 for the immersive walking play Bright Young Things and in 2021 for Nosferatu, an immersive horror experience produced by the Renaissance Theater Company.
For her work on HEREafter with co-director Kelly Bartnik, Kathleen received a Carnegie/Rockefeller Divisional Priority award through Spelman College and a Pandemic Atlanta Grant through the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office on Cultural Affairs. She was also a 2020 Idea Capital grant recipient. In addition, Kathleen is an accomplished choreographer for musical theater. Favorite credits include Metamorphoses, The Crucible, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,A Chorus Line, and The Apple, an original production she created with director Donald Rupe for the Orlando Fringe Festival.
Before landing at Spelman, Kathleen taught dance and Pilates at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory, where she was director of Oxford Dance Company for three years. Her choreography has been twice selected for American College Dance Association Gala concerts. Kathleen is also a regular contributor to ArtsATL and Dance Informa publications.