Mark W. Kidd
Mark follows a vocation to support positive change and community leadership through an approach that incorporates culture, agriculture, and technology. He loves travel, growing squash, karaoke, and music with a danceable beat. He is part of the sixth generation to steward his family’s farm in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. His professional work reflects these personal connections to the land and the environment.
Mark serves on the advisory board for the Eastern Kentucky Farmer Conference, and has previously served as a board member of Appalshop, Alternate ROOTS and was a founding steering committee member of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange. He has been a voting member of the Central Appalachian Regional Network and is a longtime member of the Appalachian Studies Association.
Mark facilitates community workshops and residencies that incorporate theater, low-cost media, and cultural organizing. He lives at the base of Pine Mountain in Whitesburg, Kentucky and on his family farm at Little Mud, Kentucky.
Mark was one of six national recipients of the Theatre Communications Group’s New Generations / Future Leaders Fellowship in 2012 and 2013 on the basis of his work in the coalfields of Southwest Virginia and Southeast Kentucky. Mark co-created the “Appalshop Innovation Lab” curriculum for community leaders to use public narrative and low-cost media practices to link community expertise with policy issues and to create opportunities for change from the ground up. His prose has been published by Americans for the Arts, the Daily Yonder, the Kentucky Caver, and Animating Democracy. His poems have appeared in The Clinch Mountain Review, Qarrtsiluni, and Still.