Katie Pearl is a theater artist whose work is fueled by the belief that personal encounter and creative exchange are necessary in a humane world. Her projects range from plays to interactive installation to community-wide collaborations, and invite audiences and participants into radically imaginative situations that playfully challenge traditional structures and norms. As co-Artistic Director of PearlDamour, the interdisciplinary company she shares with playwright Lisa D’Amour, Katie has co-created, directed, and sometimes performed in a body of work spanning 25 years. PearlDamour’s recognition includes an Obie (Nita & Zita), a Creative Capital Award (How to Build a Forest), four Multi-Arts Production Fund Awards (LandMark, Terrible Things, How to Build a Forest), two NEA Our Town grants (Milton), and a NYSCA individual artist commission. She is a producer of the documentary The Rest I Make Up about the visionary Cuban-American dramatist Maria Irene Fornes, which premiered at MoMA in February 2018 and is now screening at Festivals world-wide (Women Make Movies, distributor); she directed Fornes’ masterpiece What of the Night? at UCSD while serving there as the 2017 Quinn Martin Distinguished Chair of Directing. She is a founding member of Climate Lens, and is a co-founder of Works on Water, a triennial dedicated to supporting artists working on, near, and with the world’s waterways. Katie has been a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University and an Anschutz Fellow at Princeton, where her teaching and research focus on the concept of the Artist-Citizen. 

Katie received her MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University in 2015. She splits her time between  Brooklyn, where she lives with her wife, filmmaker Michelle Memran, and Middletown CT, where she teaches theater at Wesleyan University.