about
AWARDS | PRODUCTION HISTORY | TEACHING
Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour are a collaborative team who create performance both inside and outside traditional theater spaces. They first worked together in 1996 – a performance that lasted over 12 hours in a Grove of Trees in Austin, Texas, and was designed to be experienced from passing cars. Since then, they 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.
Lisa and Katie’s 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, 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 Nita & Zita.
We move fluidly between the roles of writer, director, performer. Always committed to pushing past horizon lines of all kinds, we ask: how can each project generate its own questions, logic and energy? In answering this question, 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.
Katie and Lisa have received multiple commissions to create new work and have won numerous awards, including a Village Voice OBIE Award (Nita & Zita). Their 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. The Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, MN, New Dramatists, NYC and Voice and Vision, NYC have supported their work in its developmental stages. Lisa and Katie’s work has been published 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, The Austin Chroncle, 2000), and the David Mark Cohen New Play Award (Austin Critics Table, 2001).
After our first collaboration (The Grove), we’ve almost never lived in the same city at the same time, and instead travel to each other’s hometowns where we dive in for short, intensive creative sessions that ultimately lead to performance. As a result, we have multiple performance homes that we adore—primarily Austin, New York City, Minneapolis, and New Orleans.
Production History
2009
How to Build a Forest (in development)
Terrible Things2007
Bird Eye Blue Print2005
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 Girls2001
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 in creative collaboration, site-specificity, and new play development at such institutions as the University of Texas at Austin, the Iowa Playwright’s Workshop, 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.
Currently Lisa is a Visiting Lecturer in Playwriting at Brown University. Katie is a Guest Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
If you are interested in a PearlDamour workshop for your group, please contact Company Manager Edward McKeaney.
