Originally from New York, Kristen has been performing since the age of five. In fifteen years, she amassed over 50 professional, regional, and community credits. Most notably, she was one of the Original Broadway Revival cast members of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, where she performed in the Children’s Choir four shows a week until the show closed. She later appeared in several holiday specials and toured the Northeast with her fellow Children’s Choir members under the name the Dreamcoat Singers. Film credits include Bluebird Girl in Disney’s Life With Mikey, for which she can also be heard on the film’s soundtrack and the educational film The Re-Team for HotPepper Productions.

Kristen received her Bachelor of Arts from Clemson University in 2004, where she was one of the first theatre majors in the college’s newly developed Performing Arts track. At Clemson, Kristen majored in writing and acting. Favorite roles include Babe in Crimes of the Heart, and Liz/Harriet in Museum, both of which earned her nominations for the Irene Ryan Award for Acting from the Kenndey Center’s American College Theatre Festival. Her original works Bananas and Booze and What it Cost You were both a part of New Plays Premiere at Clemson University and her ten minute play You Can’t Eat Meat on Fridays was a Region IV finalist for the Kennedy Center’s ACTF Ten Minute Play Competition in 2004.

She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing from the University of New Mexico in 2007. While there, she taught three sections of Playwriting 355, Fundamentals of Playwriting and was an Assistant Producer for 2005’s Words Afire New Works Play Festival. Her one act play Welcome to Taupeville was presented as a staged reading in 2004’s Words Afire and went on to be selected as a workshop piece for the Director’s Lab at Lincoln Center that same year. Over the next two years, her full length shows Let it Get to You and How to Conquer a Southern Woman were both main stage shows in Words Afire 2005 and 2006, respectively. 

In 2007, she attended the Bonderman National Youth Playwriting Development Conference and Symposium as an Assistant Dramaturg, and performed a selection from her upcoming play for young audiences, Claire of a 1000 Stories. Most recently, her play Four Days in the Delta, inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, was one of seven plays chosen from a national applicant pool for a development intensive at the Kennedy Center, where it will be directed by Kent Nicholson of Theatreworks and dramturged by Lenora Brown of DePaul University.