Katie teaches playwriting and acting to elementary, middle and high school students.

She believes that teaching the two topics together fosters students’ trust in their empathy, language and imaginations.  With elementary schoolers, she distills a play to four key ingredients and empowers students to write their own by imagining themselves in character’s shoes and exploring what they would say next.  Her middle and high school curricula incorporate exercises from Daniel Sklar, Paula Vogel and Maria Irene Fornes to deepen characters’ needs and take ownership of story structure. She uses small-group prompts for writers to hear their work aloud and try rewrites without the pressure of a large audience - and to let student actors and directors to practice embodying the physical cues in a written text.

In 2012 and 2013, Katie taught and directed in Yale’s Dwight Edgewood Project for local middle schoolers. From 2014-2022, she taught, directed and developed curriculum for Chautauqua Institution’s Young Playwrights Project, which annually serves approximately 500 2nd-4th graders in Western New York.  She was promoted to lead teaching artist in 2018. Her work for this program was recognized in the 2021 New York Pops Up! Festival. For Syracuse Stage, Katie has led standalone workshops as well as the theater’s inaugural summer program for middle and high school students.  She received a 2022 SOURCE grant from Syracuse University to work with undergraduate student researchers on program assessment in elementary school playwriting curricula.