Katrina Dunn
Katrina Dunn | |
|---|---|
| Born | British Columbia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Education | http://www.sfu.ca/sca.html https://theatrefilm.ubc.ca/ |
| Occupation(s) | theatre director, producer |
| Years active | 1989 - present |
Katrina Dunn (1963 - ) is a Canadian theatre director, producer, teacher and scholar. She was the Artistic Director of Touchstone Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia from 1997 to 2016. She currently teaches in the Theatre Program at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
Career
Early Training and Career
Dunn was born on a Canadian Army base in Soest, Germany to Canadian parents. She grew up in Vancouver and did undergraduate work in Theatre and Dance at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. After leaving SFU she co-founded Ruby Slippers Theatre, an independent Vancouver theatre company. In 1997 she took over Touchstone Theatre, an established mid-sized company with a mandate to produce Canadian plays.
Touchstone Tenure
Dunn was the fifth Artistic Director of Touchstone Theatre, which was founded in 1976, following Ian Fenwick, Gordon McCall, John Cooper and Roy Surette. During her tenure she sought to expand the company’s season and support the work of local emerging playwrights. The 2000/01 season saw the premiere of Unity (1918) by Kevin Kerr, which was developed at Touchstone and went on to win the Governor General’s Award for English Drama in 2002. Two significant seasons garnered extra attention and conversation. Her 2009/10 season was devoted to the work of Canadian female playwrights, and the 2010/11 season featured only Canadian musicals. She developed the Flying Start program for new BC playwrights with the Playwrights Theatre Centre and began Vancouver’s In Tune event devoted to supporting the development of new musicals.
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
In 2003 Dunn co-founded the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival with Norman Armour. The initiative grew out of the presenting activities of the companies that Dunn and Armour ran at the time – Touchstone Theatre and Rumble Productions. The Festival quickly grew into one of the most important cultural events in Western Canada. After PuSh became a separate society, Dunn contributed to the curation of the event for two years before leaving to focus her full attention on Touchstone.
Awards
Dunn's work has garnered numerous nominations and awards. She has been nominated multiple times for Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards in several categories. She has won twice for direction: in 2001 for Michael Healey's Kicked and in 2010 (as co-director) for Judith Thompson's Palace of the End. In 2010, Dunn was recognized by the Women’s Caucus of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, who awarded her with its "Bra D'Or" (Golden Bra) for supporting and promoting the work of Canadian female playwrights.
Scholarly Work
In 2011 Dunn began graduate work in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Theatre and Film. Her scholarly research explores the spatial manifestations of theatre and ecocritical theatre. She won the Robert G. Lawrence Prize for an Emerging Scholar from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research in 2015 and tied for first place in 2017. In 2018 she accepted a teaching position in the Theatre Program at the University of Manitoba, which is part of the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media. At U of M she teaches Acting, Directing, Theatre History and Theory. She has published articles and reviews in Canadian Theatre Review and Performance Research.