Katie McHugh

Katie McHugh

Acting & Career Advising

Type: One-on-one

Duration: 55 minutes

Cost: $90 / Pro & VIP: $75

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Audition Prep with Katie

As a long-time mentor and career coach, I take a holistic approach to every session. I believe every young artist has a unique voice and should be encouraged to express their individuality through their artistic choices. I guide and nurture each student in making educated and intelligent decisions on their career path.

As an acting coach, the root of my directorial guidance is truth, finding the character’s core desires through research, doing and redoing. Every character is a human being, every human being is defined by their choices. Whether you’re tackling a 400 year old text or a 4 year old text, the approach is the same, find what makes them tick.

About Katie McHugh:
Katie McHugh is an award-winning international theatre director, producer and educator who specializes in devised and experimental theatre and the development of new work. She is the Artistic Director and Founder of Yonder Window Theatre Company, based in New York. Katie holds an MFA in directing from The New School for Drama and is the Founding Director of the Southeastern Teen Shakespeare Company as well as Co-Founder of the Teen Shakespeare Conservatory.

In her early career, Katie created and ran the education program at the Pensacola Little Theatre, where she developed and taught 14 classes a week and ran several educational tours to local schools. Her enthusiasm for educational theatre earned her a nomination for the Champion of the Arts Award, and the Big Read Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Katie directed over 50 productions in Florida before moving to New York to attend Graduate School. She is a five-time director for the Writopia WorldWide Plays Festival sponsored by David Letterman, and has been a guest director with the NYU MFA dramatic writing program. She is the Artistic Ambassador of the Mexican Fringe Festival, San Miguel and a member of the League of Professional Theatre Women.

In February of 2017, Yonder Window Theatre Company made its maiden voyage with a multidisciplinary, multicultural, tri-lingual international production called The Dream Project, performed at Muv arte gallery in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Since then, Yonder Window has produced with Katie as director, five shows: PLACES at 59 East 59th Theatre’s East to Edinburgh Festival, then at The New Town Theatre in Edinburgh, where it was performed 24 times; The House on Poe Street by Fengar Gael at the 14th Street Y Theatre, October 2017; Phase 2.0 of The Dream Project, held at the GK Art Center in Brooklyn, NY March 2018; Phase 3.0 of The Dream Project, the largest iteration yet, performed in Montreal at Universcene, Fall of 2019; and the most recent large scale devised production, The Creative Crusade, a virtual exploration and collaboration about solitude, Artists from 40 cities in 7 different countries created 8 pieces presented online in 2020. Katie has directed several virtual performances in 2021, including We Have to Hurry, a new virtual play by Emmy winner Dorothy Lyman and Gertrude written by Grant MacDermott, Yonder Window’s Playwright in Residence.

For the past two years, Katie and her team, under the banner of Yonder Window, have worked to create Stagepunch. Her roots in educational theatre coupled with the hundreds of young artists she has mentored over the years make her the perfect leader in the pursuit of helping a new generation of artists succeed.

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