““Katherine and the entire From the Ground UP team, are one of the most passionate and driven group of mentors I have ever had. Their commitment to the program, the arts, and the artists they work with made me feel empowered to take risks.””
Katherine Murphy Lewis
Founder & Artistic Director
Katherine Murphy Lewis is the creative architect behind From the Ground Up — a director and dramaturg whose penchant for experimentation has produced award-winning performances, launched viable artistic careers, and redefined what an incubation model can look like in the American theater landscape.
Lewis works fluidly across contemporary dance, physical storytelling, comedy, and devised performance. Under her direction, resident artist Andrea Parson won the Best Physical Theater award at the Fall United Solo Festival 2024 in New York City for You Can’t Be Serious — a four-year collaboration hailed as “real and raw yet polished and top-tier” (All About Solo, NYC). Her work has been recognized for putting “distinctive voices center stage” and embodying a “rejection of patriarchal standards” (Willamette Week).
Lewis grew up in Ashland, Oregon — her mother working the box office at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, making theater accessible to a family “living very close to the edge.” That proximity to both art and precarity shaped everything that followed: the conviction that creativity belongs to everyone, the refusal to accept gatekeeping as inevitable, and ultimately the responsive, non-linear curriculum she spent ten years building at FTGU. Her formal training spans physical theater, mask, and clown at Dell’Arte International, devised touring work with Company of Wolves out of Glasgow, and theater arts at Southern Oregon University. She is currently developing The End, an immersive exploration of grief built from audio recordings made during her father’s fifteen-month journey with terminal cancer, in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize finalist Amanda Gronich.
Arwen Curry Development Director
Arwen Curry is the director/producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, which was nominated for a Hugo Award and broadcast on PBS American Masters, the BBC, and Sweden's SVT. Since its premiere in 2018, the film has screened for festival and community audiences across the U.S. and more than two dozen countries worldwide. Arwen's 2023 project The Journey That Matters, published in installments on Literaryhub.com, includes six additional short films about Le Guin's life and work. In 2022, Arwen was an ITVS Humanities Documentary Development Fellow with support from the NEH. Before that, she helped produce EAMES: The Architect & The Painter, Regarding Susan Sontag, American Jerusalem: Jews & The Making of San Francisco, several films for KQED, and other projects. As a writer and consultant, she advises documentary filmmakers on grants, scripts, and proposals. Arwen is a former editor of the punk magazine Maximum Rock‘n’Roll and a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in San Francisco.
Aberdeen Stuart Program Assistant
Portland born and raised, Aberdeen Stuart has explored countless mediums through the years. In the visual arts, they explored culture and tradition through pen and ink drawings of Scandinavian folk objects as an ode to their heritage. Aberdeen began performing in a Swedish youth folk dance group as a child and has loved the stage ever since. In July 2024 as a part of the first Bodyvox adult recreational summer intensive, they developed a drag persona Deenie Weenie and opened the show with a lip sync number. Playing with gender and identity, they continue to develop visual and performance art now.