Katie Pearl is director, playwright, and educator. Her work explores the performance event as a tool for engagement, one that can enliven people to the world and to each other and spark the flexibility of thought and trust in imagination that is rapidly disappearing in today’s divisive climate. As Co-Artistic Director of the Obie-winning PearlDamour, she has pushed the boundaries of theater-making and civic conversation for over 25 years through projects that range from large-scale spectacle (the 8-hour performance installation How to Build a Forest; the 40-acre Lost in the Meadow; the theatrical fabulation Ocean Filibuster) to intimate encounter (the performance tour for twenty Bird Eye Blue Print; the itinerant SLABBER) to community-wide collaborations (the five-town Milton project, created with and for small towns named Milton across the country). PearlDamour is the recipient of four Map Fund, two NEA, a Creative Capital Award and the 2011 Lee Reynolds award, given annually by the League of Professional Theater Women to a woman whose work in the medium of theatre has helped illuminate the possibilities for social, cultural, or political change.
Commissions/presenters include: The American Repertory Theater, Kitchen, the Whitney Museum, PS122, Brookfield Arts, HERE Arts Center, Longwood Botanical Gardens, the Walker Art Center, and the Contemporary Arts Center/New Orleans. Pearl was the 2016/17 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton and a visiting lecturer at Harvard, where her work focused on the concept of the Artist-Citizen, and the 2017 Quinn Martin Guest Chair of Directing at UCSD. She is on faculty at Wesleyan University where she teaches theater directing, site-specific performance, and collaborative practices. Alum of Drama League; founding member of Climate Lens and Works on Water; member of SDC. www.Katiepearl.com/www.pearldamour.com
