Katie Knutson began serving as the NEST ED in August of 2022. Before that, she spent a combined total of 23 years serving on storytelling Boards at local, regional, and national storytelling organizations. These included the National Storytelling Network (NSN), Northlands Storytelling Network, Story Arts of Minnesota, and the Youth, Educators & Storytellers Special Interest Group of NSN. In these roles, she has produced conferences, festivals, and events that featured diverse presenters, stories, and topics, including the largest, most diverse storytelling conference and festival in US history - the 2020 NSN Connected Conference, which featured 262 storytellers from around the world. She continues to be honored to be able to put her experience to work to help guide NEST into the future.
When not working for NEST as your part-time ED, Katie is a professional storyteller, teaching artist, and coach based outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has delivered residencies, performances, and classes to around 40,000 children and adults on four continents. She has been a featured performer at international storytelling festivals in Italy and the United Arab Emirates, and has performed and taught in Chile and Canada. Knutson has received three Minnesota State Arts Board grants in partnership with schools to be their Storyteller-in-Residence for a year or more each. She has worked for several theater companies in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and is a current COMPAS roster artist. In addition to writing and curating the New Voices Column in Storytelling Magazine for 9 years, Knutson also contributed to Tomorrow’s Storytellers Today (Cordi, Parkhurst Brothers, 2021), Science with Storytelling: Strategies for the K-5 Classroom (Stenson/Norfolk/Ford, McFarland, 2017), and Storytelling Strategies for Reaching and Teaching Children with Special Needs (Norfolk/Ford, Libraries Unlimited, 2018). In her free time, you can often find her digging in her garden, snuggling with her cats, playing board games with her family, or enjoying nature. Find out more about Katie and her company, Rippling Stories, at www.ripplingstories.com.