Charmingly quirky. Girl next door meets goofball. Passionate and present. “Always has ants in her pants.”
^^ All phrases used to describe Kallen by industry folk and her mom.
Kallen was born and raised in Memphis, TN.
A peculiarly shy child (her parents received notes home from teachers asking “why doesn’t she talk”?), Kallen preferred telling stories to her menagerie of stuffed animals and dancing to an old cassette tape recording of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” than socializing with other tykes…so obviously Kallen eventually found theatre.
Kallen later earned her BFA in Theatre Performance from Belmont University, a Meisner-based program in Nashville, TN, and received additional training from Tennessee Shakespeare Company, Stella Adler Conservatory in NYC, and the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Institute in Waterford, CT. At the O’Neill, home of the National Playwright’s Conference and Musical Theatre Conference, Kallen discovered her affinity for new play development, ensemble-based theatre, and devised work (in fact those are some of her favorite things).
Kallen is kind of obsessed with other writers. You should ask her favorite because they’re constantly changing. But she’s always excited about redemption arcs, pieces that encourage social change, intimate portraits of interesting people, and incredible stories from history that have gone untold . Speaking of: she has co-written a play about Nazi-killing women in the Netherlands, which was workshopped at a university and is now headed for development in NYC.
As far as film and tv, you can watch Kallen on Nashville, A Crime to Remember, and as a lead in the feature, This Day Forward. OR making her own stuff with her production company, SoulStir Creative! With SoulStir, she created and co-produced a series on disability inclusion in media called ABLE. Check out Playbill’s write-up and trailer release here. It premiered on Amazon Prime in 2019!
Kallen is a member of AEA, SAG-AFTRA, the DG, and NYWIFT, but not the WNBA — no hand-eye coordination. Bummer.
“Art is the act of the spirit. It asks you to be a conduit for something larger than yourself” - Anne Bogart