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Kate Fuglei is an American actress, singer, and writer known for her work in TV, film, and theatre. Most recently, she played the leading role of the famed Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in the musical Beautiful Lady at LaMama in NYC, directed by Anne Bogart with music by Liz Swados. She grew up in a blue collar family in the heartland of America, Omaha, Nebraska. Her great fortune was to have a high school drama teacher who was related to Henrik Ibsen. Her first role was in the Lorraine Hansberry play The Sign In Sidney Brustein's Window. Kate got her professional start at the Guthrie Theater when it was under the co-artistic directorship of Liviu Ciulei and Garland Wright. She won a McKnight Fellowship under the auspices of the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, and also worked extensively with the Illusion Theater.
Moving to NYC in the late eighties, she co-founded a theater company, DearKnows, which created new works, among them a series of plays based on James Joyce's Dubliners, under the artistic directorship of Paul Walker and Christopher Markle. Kate worked at the Public Theater in Love's Labor's Lost under the direction of Gerald Freedman, at Arena Stage in a seminal production of Crime and Punishment directed by Yuri Lyubimov, head of the famed Taganka theater in Moscow. She also worked at Portland Stage in Man Ist Man under the direction of Liz Diamond and at the McCarter Theater, among many others.
Since moving to LA in 1990, Kate has worked in over forty television shows, features and short films, most recently on Star Trek: Picard, This Is Us and in the short film I Live On Your Visits, based on a Dorothy Parker short story. Kate also was in the first National Broadway Tour of the Tony Award winning musical Spring Awakening, directed by Michael Mayer. She has also performed in theaters on the west coast, including Our Town directed by Michael Greif at the La Jolla Playhouse, A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Cynthia White at the Utah Shakespeare Festival and The Red and The Black at A Contemporary Theater in Seattle, directed by Jeff Steitzer.
In 2014, Kate's one woman show Rachel Calof, a musical based on the memoir of a Jewish homesteader, won Best Musical at the United Solo Festival in NYC. Rachel Calof was directed by Emmy winner Ellen S Pressman, adapted by Ken LaZebnik, with music and lyrics by Leslie Steinweiss. Kate has toured Rachel Calof across the country, and performed at historic venues such as the Pico Union Project in LA.
Kate's four novels based on the lives of Enrico Fermi, Maria Montessori, Frank Capra and Federico Fellini have been published by Mentoris Press. She married to award-winning playwright, screenwriter and television writer Ken LaZebnik and is the proud mother of Jack LaZebnik, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger, and Ben LaZebnik, a graduate of Columbia University and current student at Berkeley Law.
She is grateful for her family and many mentors and teachers along the way, including Austin Pendleton, Janet Alhanti, Julie Bovasso, Ken Brecher, Karen Morrow, Joanne Zajak, Kay Montgomery and James Eckhouse.
