about
AWARDS | PRODUCTION HISTORY | TEACHING
PearlDamour: Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour
We are an Obie-Award winning collaborative team who create performance both inside and outside traditional theater spaces. We are known for large-scale performances that mix theater and installation — such as How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance in which we assemble and disassemble a simulated forest on an empty stage over 8 hours – and intimate performances designed for small audiences — such as Bird Eye Blue Print, created for a set of small vacant offices in the World Financial Center in Manhattan. Over our 15-year history of making work together, we have devised a body of work that is attentive to the performer / audience relationship, and searches for new approaches to narrative through the accumulation of text, image, physicality and architectural elements. We want our audiences to feel like they are inside of an experience, rather than watching something happen “over there.” When we make a show we create room for the audience to feel like they have slipped into the private headspace of a performer they are watching: an intimate, associative, surprising place.
Our work is intensely interdisciplinary – crafted by extensive collaborations with artists of other fields, including visual artists Krista Kelley Walsh, Charles Goldman, Kurt Mueller and Shawn Hall, choreographer Emily Johnson, set designer Mimi Lien and composers Sxip Shirey, Joel Pickard and Tom McDermott. Other past collaborators include ArtSpot Productions’ Artistic Director Kathy Randels who co-created and co-performed in our OBIE-winning Nita & Zita in 2003.
In the past we have been commissioned by organizations like PS122, The Kitchen and the Whitney Museum of Art to create new pieces. Our work as a team has been funded by MAP Fund, Creative Capital, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Irving Linn Charitable Trust, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and The Moore Family Fund for the Arts of the Minneapolis Foundation, among others. We have developed our work at The Playwrights Center , New Dramatists, Voice and Vision, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Mitchell Center for the Arts in Houston and Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. We’ve published writing about our work in Theater Magazine (“Imperfectly Harmful Theater,” with Melissa Kievman and Melissa James Gibson) and Play: Journal of Plays (Always/Never Her Trilogy). Local Critical Acclaim includes “Best Site Specific Performance of 2007” (for Bird Eye Blue Print, Gothmaist, NYC, 2007), “Best Public Art” (for LandMARK, City Pages, Minneapolis, 2005), “Best Touring Show” (for SLABBER and Nita & Zita, The Austin Chroncle, 2000 and 2001), and the David Mark Cohen New Play Award (for Anna Bella Eema, from the Austin Critics Table, 2001).
Currently, Katie lives in Providence, RI as she pursues her MFA in writing for performance at Brown University. Lisa splits her time between New York and New Orleans. We consider New Orleans, Austin, Minneapolis and New York our artistic homes – much of our work grew up and premiered in those (awesome) cities.
Production History
2012
How to Build a Forest (Duke University)
2011
How to Build a Forest (NYC: The Kitchen)
2010
How to Build a Forest (in development)
Terrible Things (NYC: PS122)2009
How to Build a Forest (in development)
Terrible Things (NYC: PS122)2007
Bird Eye Blue Print (NYC: Arts < WFC)2005
Nita & Zita Tour
The Cataract
LandMARK2004
SLABBER (Study No. 5 and 6)
LIMO2003
Nita & Zita Tour
Anna Bella Eema (NYC)2002
3 Mutants: Plays About Girls (Ithaca, NY)2001
Anna Bella Eema (Austin)
SLABBER (Study No. 4)
Nita & Zita Premiere2000
SLABBER (Study Nos. 2 and 3)
The Parking Project1998
Dress Me Blue / Window Me Sky1997
The Grove
Teaching
Both together and individually, Lisa and Katie teach workshops or semester-long courses in creative collaboration, site-specificity, and new play development at such institutions as the University of Texas at Austin, the Iowa Playwright’s Workshop, ACT, Dartmouth University, Brown University and The Playwrights’ Center. They have also developed their work using student actors and assistants at the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, Brown University and Ithaca College.
If you are interested in a PearlDamour workshop for your group, please contact Katie: Katie-at-pearldamour-dot-com.
