Katie Dawson

Katie Dawson is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin and serves as director of the Drama for Schools program. Her areas of research include community-engaged outreach programs, arts integration, youth theatre, museum theatre, drama-in-education, theatre-in-education, and teaching artist praxis.

She is the former coordinator of the Science Comes Alive interactive theatre program at the California Science Center. She spent three years as a classroom teacher and over twenty-five years facilitating arts integration lessons in schools in Ohio, Chicago, Montana, California, Texas, Washington D.C., and the northern interior of Alaska. Katie was named the 2005 Winifred Ward Scholar by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education for excellence as an emerging scholar and practitioner. She has facilitated trainings, presented workshops, and given interactive keynotes at numerous locations including: The University of Southern California, Texas State University, New York University, Southeast Center for Education and the Arts, Young Audiences of Northeast Texas, Theatre Action Project, mindPOP, Illinois Theatre Association, Texas Theatre Educators Association, Texas Association of Museums, Texas ASCD, the Dana Foundation, American Alliance of Theatre and Education, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the American Educational Research Association. Her scholarship has been published in Youth Theatre Journal, International Journal of Education and the Arts, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, and the International Journal for Learning through the Arts, among others. Her play, No Problem, is published by Dramatic Publishing. Katie worked as an actor in repertory theatres in Chicago, Alabama, Montana, and Los Angeles. She developed and sold two children’s television shows and made multiple guest appearances on talk shows (Donnie and Marie, Bob Saget, Ellen) modeling inquiry-based activities for families.