Kate Lahey works at the intersections of people, culture and learning. Kate has over ten years experience in designing and delivering thoughtful, experimental academic, public and private research, education, and knowledge mobilisation at the cross sections of theory and practice, ephemera and material action.

Kate holds a PhD from the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. While teaching and researching at U of T, Kate pondered intergenerational trauma, visual and material culture, and how we make sense of the incomprehensible. More recently, Kate has taught at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador where she was awarded the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2023. She currently conducts research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Office of Public Engagement and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial University exploring the intersection between humanities and physics, culture and technology, theory and method. Over the last decade, Kate’s academic research and writing has spanned intergenerational trauma, culture and design, transitional justice and international criminal law, public engagement, radical research methodologies, social change, placekeeping, disability, temporalities, psychoanalysis, and physics. Her research praxis informs her approach to systems, management, and pedagogical design, namely, working in the ‘between spaces’ of visioning, strategy, design, systems, and process.

Kate centres curiosity and care in her approach to people processes and crafting organisational infrastructure across finance, strategy, culture, learning, and teams. Kate combines systems thinking, critical analysis, and imaginative interventions to curate methods and epistemologies for transition and transformation. She loves to provoke deep engagement, reflection and resiliency and is passionate about co-designing organisational principles that are fluid across scales, weaving collective commitments, and making non-linear structures that facilitate play, joy, and humor in ways that balance seriousness of purpose. Her focus is on making and tending to social and digital infrastructures that support deep insight, intentionality, and meaning making in the world. 

Kate enjoys swimming in the spaces between, weaving relations, pondering provocations, and finding transformation in the multitudinous. As such, she makes music as front person of the band Weary. She also writes award winning arts criticism for Canadian Art, Visual Arts News and Peripheral Review. She has been a musician-in-residence at Lawnya Vawnya and a writer-in-residence at Eastern Edge.