Katie Beck

Katie Beck is a creative community builder, director, writer, facilitator, speaker, and artivist who works to build spaces that highlight, center, and prioritize historically excluded voices. Since establishing Gum-Dip Theatre in 2016, Katie has produced or directed nearly 110 performances that celebrate, challenge, and reinvent community identity through choose-what-you-pay performances, story circles, workshops, and multicultural events. GDT creates theatre as a vehicle for practicing different factual and imaginary versions of oneself, for representing the narratives that are often ignored, and for elevating voices and identities that are not included in the mainstream. Recent directing and devising credits include Three Countries, One Mother, Brokers Without Borders, Denied Admission, My North Hill, Imprisoned, Namaste-WHAT?, In Search of Alternative Dreams, and Into the Mold. Some of her playwriting highlights include Obnoxiously Unconstitutional (upcoming), Rebranding the City: a Humanizing Tour of Akron, Into the Mold, and A Town For Us. Katie serves as a Commissioner for the City of Akron’s founding Public Art Commission.  She is a recipient of Greater Akron Chamber’s ’30 for the Future’ Award in 2019, Arts Alive! Outstanding Artist in Theatre Award in 2018, Akron Fellowship for League of Creative Interventionists in 2017, and three Knight Foundation Arts Challenge Awards in 2016, 2019, and 2021.