Hana Keegan ’17
Finding a place
By Kiera O’Brien ’18
Hana Keegan’s COA journey began at the back of a crowded lecture hall at a sprawling university in London. Keegan, who graduated in 2017, remembers the moment she knew she needed a more hands-on approach. “I found my way to COA by trying the polar opposite first,” she jokes. “I was sitting with 400 other students in a lecture on economics and scrolling through COA’s website. I remember thinking, Wow, these students get to go kayaking!”
The academic flexibility and small size of the college also appealed to Keegan, who grew up on the 13-mile long Tortola Island in the British Virgin Islands and was homeschooled until late high school. Initially, she focused on climate politics, gravitating towards Doreen Stabinsky’s classes and the climate justice advocacy of the student-run Earth In Brackets. “The climate policy track was a big pull for me when I was considering COA,” she says. “But I also remember emailing [Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Chair in Performing Arts] Jodi Baker before I even arrived asking her if I could be in her Play Production course.”
Keegan decided on other classes that first semester, but theater was never far from her imagination. When she finally took the plunge—signing on as an actor and dramaturg for the 2016 COA production of The Sneeze, a vaudevillian collection of Chekhov shorts—she knew she’d found her place. “It was the happiest I ever felt at COA,” she recalls.
Building on what she learned working on The Sneeze, Keegan used her senior project as an opportunity to try her hand at directing. Collaborating with community members and a local theater in Crested Butte, Colorado—a tiny ski town where she has close family ties—Keegan produced and directed Waiting for Lefty, an American classic she studied in one of Baker’s courses. “In many ways, I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. But Jodi’s trust, and her encouragement to go try and figure it out on my own, was fundamental.”
Since that first foray into directing, she’s never looked back. Now based in London, Keegan has worked as an associate director, dramaturg, and accessibility consultant for almost a dozen productions at the National Theater and the Old Vic, including a 2019 revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons starring Sally Field.
The path has not always been easy. Shortly after leaving COA, Keegan enrolled in an intensive program for emerging directors. “They had us working for three weeks, no days off, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day. My journey to identifying as having a disability began with that training.” Sharing her diagnosis of mild cerebral palsy with me during our interview, she reflects, “I’ve had to constantly fight so hard to stay in the industry because it is not set up to be inclusive or accessible, in so many ways.”
Keegan knew that to continue working in theater, she needed to find a different model. This led her to the UK-based Graeae Theatre Company. According to their mission statement, “Graeae is a force for change in world-class theater, boldly placing Deaf and disabled actors center stage and challenging preconceptions.”
Training with Graeae not only brought Keegan back to London but also connected her with other companies, directors, and artists working at the intersections of theater, access, and disability justice.
Most recently, she collaborated with Sacha Wares, associate director of the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, to mount Museum of Austerity, a virtual/mixed reality installation that explores the lived consequences of British austerity measures of the 2010s.
“One of my biggest roles for the show was as an access consultant,” says Keegan. “But I think Wares wanted me on the job because I’m not afraid to have honest conversations with her about the technology and to say, I don’t know. Let’s try and figure it out. What happens when we use the technology this way or that?” She continues: “Mixed reality is incredibly interdisciplinary—I think this project is the most human-ecological thing I’ve done since leaving COA.”
Keegan is specifically compelled by the questions that emergent mediums like virtual reality raise for artists and audiences alike: “One of the things that fascinated me working on this project is that this medium is so new, there aren’t any rules yet. So we need artists and writers and dramaturgs to be part of the development process.” Human ecologists, too.
