Kate (Kathleen) JasonSmith (born 1950) is a New Zealand actor, producer, playwright, filmmaker, photographer, and businesswoman. Based in Wellington, she has studied and worked elsewhere, including Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. A feminist, as a theatre and film practitioner, she has been most recognised throughout her career for her role in establishing and producing Hens' Teeth, a platform for dozens of Kiwi female actors, musicians, and comedians that became a staple of the New Zealand theatre and comedy scene between 1988 and 2003. Her television film, Xmas for Lou (1992), won the Best Drama – Television award in the New Zealand Film and Television Awards of 1994. From 2018 on, the one-woman show I'll Tell You This for Nothing: My Mother the War Hero has received national and international praise for both the play, which she wrote, and her performance.

Kate JasonSmith was born in Eastbourne, England, in 1950. Her mother, Phyllis Helena Jean Garvin, Légion d’honneur, was a QA nurse on the European front during World War II; her father, Jason Lewis Francis Smith, MC, was an engineering officer in the British Army during the war, and an architect by profession after the war. Both Irish, her parents emigrated to New Zealand in part because her mother was Protestant and her father was Catholic.

Kate JasonSmith completed a Dip Design in 1967 from Wellington Polytechnic (where Len Lye also studied) Dip Film Planning and Production at the New South Wales Institute of Technology in Sydney in 1987. She received a BA in Theatre and Film from Victoria University of Wellington in 1998. In 2002 she received a Society for Research on Women (administered by the New Horizons for Women Trust) award to do research on the number and type of female roles on New Zealand stages and screens for the 2002 year; the results were part of work she did toward a BA (Hons).

"My first job at 18 was as an actress. Following fast upon the heels of the heady glory was the disgust that all the good parts were written for men. When I asked why, I was told 'Because women don't do anything interesting.' The real horror of that statement was that for years I believed it, in spite of the wealth of evidence around me to the contrary. Finally I asked the right question, why women weren't writing plays and was told 'You're a woman, why don't you write plays.' It was good advice—the reason I've created anything of importance in my life is because I've given up waiting for someone else to do it.'"

In 1971 Kate JasonSmith "heard that the [National] Film Unit were training people as directors. She had just completed a tour with Sam Neill and the New Zealand Players and thought: 'I'd be quite a good person because I've spent two years working as a professional actor and I've got a year at Design School. So I wrote and said I was interested in being trained as a director. And they wrote a letter back to me saying that they didn't train women as directors because they got married and had children.' To make it worse, Sam Neill applied at the same time for the same position and was accepted." Kate JasonSmith was also among a number of women who "were told they couldn't be camerawomen because the gear was too heavy—even though in Kate's case she had been carrying heavy mail bags up and down the hills of Wellington while working as a postie."

In 1976, Kate JasonSmith, along with Donna Cross, Christine Poland, and Nina Dawidowska, formed the idea of "a women-only art studio-gallery ... called Nga Tamahine Marama—the daughters of light, sun, moon and stars." Located in Wellington, it was later established by another team with the aim of encouraging "women to work according to their own way of seeing things, based on the premise that men and women view life from very different perspectives [because] in a male-dominated world, women's different insights and different kinds of creativity are too often scorned by the male critics." Hens' Teeth likewise included many sketches that involved the "deconstruction of gender on stage," as theatre historian Hannah Banks said with regard to regular acts involving irony resulting from cross-dressing characters.

This interest in women's opportunities within the creative arts has been a life-long concern for Kate JasonSmith. In 2016 and in 2018, Playmarket, "New Zealand's national playwriting agency," released statistical research on "what was being performed" over a given period of time in the country's major theatres, including information about the involvement of women relative to men. The later research "depicted the significant difference in the amount of works by women" that were performed. Adopting Māori cultural practice, Kate JasonSmith (along with Linda Wilson of Circa Theatre) called a "Hui on Women in Theatre" "to discuss the representation of women in New Zealand theatre," which was held "on the 19th September 2016, the 123rd anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in Aotearoa. ... Around one hundred people attended the two sessions at Circa Theatre in Wellington, ... made up ... predominantly of women, of all ages and stages in their careers including actors, directors, designers, writers, producers and academics."

Kate JasonSmith gave the first of two introductory presentations at this meeting, in which she "welcomed everyone and spoke of the times she has experienced injustice and discrimination against women in the New Zealand theatre industry." Among other things, this led to an interview broadcast on Standing Room Only, a weekly arts show aired nationally by Radio New Zealand. The follow-up meeting, an "all-day event" held on 11 March 2017 and "convened by Linda Wilson and Kate JasonSmith," featured a keynote address by Gaylene Preston, in which she "made the observation that corporate talk of goals and list making were not applicable to the theatrical life – career paths were replaced by "people who just do stuff." Nonetheless, as the hui closed "Kate JasonSmith introduced the concept of 50/50 by 20/20, meaning a goal of 50% participation and recognition of women in theatre by 2020."