Kate McCartney

Kate McCartney (born 1979 or 1980) is an Australian comedian, writer, actor and illustrator. She is a frequent collaborator with Kate McLennan, which has led to their being dubbed the Kates. McCartney was born in Perth, Western Australia, and moved to Melbourne with her family at the age of 10, where she grew up in Camberwell.

McCartney worked as a comedian and also worked in animation. Her television writing credits have included Big Bite, Hamish and Andy, Adam Hills Tonight, and Spicks and Specks. She met Kate McLennan in 2011 after McLennan voiced a character in an animation for her. She co-created the web series Bleak with McLennan in 2010, about being a single 30-something, which won the Kit Denton Disfellowship for Courage and Excellence in Performance Writing at the 2011 AWGIE Awards, worth A$30,000.

With McLennan, McCartney created the cooking-based web series The Katering Show, which screened on their YouTube channel in 2014, with a second season on ABC TV and ABC iview in 2016. In 2017 they created the comedy Get Krack!n, in which they played breakfast show presenters, and in 2021 they created Slushy, a workplace comedy set in the Australian Antarctic research base, available as a podcast on Audible. The pair wrote the 2023 Amazon Prime Video series Deadloch starring Kate Box, which won McCartney a Best Television Script Writing Award at the AACTA Awards in February 2024. The series reached the top 10 on Prime in over 165 countries, and its second series, set in the Top End, premiered on 20 March 2026.