Teaching & Community Outreach
Katherine is a teaching artist and literacy tutor who helps students ages three years to adult find their unique voices and express themselves with clarity and purpose, whether it be through acting, dance, music, or writing. She has served as a teaching artist for several organizations, including Pulse Beat Music, Oak Park Festival Theatre, The Viola Project, Family Matters, and Metropolis Performing Arts Centre. Katherine has also worked as a Theatre-for-Young-Audiences performer with Adventure Stage Chicago, AlphaBet Soup Productions, and ArtsLanes.
Katherine received a BFA in Theatre Performance from the University of Michigan and was trained as a writing tutor at U-M's Sweetland Writing Center. She also completed coursework in arts education and integration at Oxford University. Further information regarding Katherine's teaching and outreach experience and qualifications is included in her teaching resume (PDF format).
If you are interested in contacting Katherine for private tutoring, please email her directly. If you are interested in having Katherine come to your school or organization as a teaching artist or performer, please email her or contact one of her partner organizations below.
Pulse Beat Music
Since its inception a decade ago, Pulse Beat Music has focused on what makes music universal and fun. Pulse Beat emphasizes world and American music and cultures, striving to make music accessible, rewarding, and fun for students. Katherine teaches drama, dance, and music through Pulse Beat and is currently its teaching-artist-in-residence at St. Therese Chinese Catholic School. She also has experience teaching modern dance alongside a drumming instructor for Pulse Beat's "Dance and Drum" class.
Oak Park Festival Theatre
Oak Park Festival Theatre (OPFT) is a professional theater company producing the works of William Shakespeare like they were meant to be staged – as thrilling, living, popular theater. Katherine is the Outreach Coordinator for OPFT and performs in its production of Shakespeare: Scenes, Sonnets & Songs at Chicago-area schools. Perfect for middle school students, this forty-minute show debunks some of the greatest myths about Shakespeare (e.g., that Shakespeare is boring or impossible to understand). Katherine is also the curriculum designer and lead teacher for OPFT's Taking Shakespeare from the Page to the Stage, a two-hour workshop for middle and high school students designed to introduce the use of scansion, punctuation, and other text clues to help students learn how to put Shakespeare's scripts on their feet.