Katie Knutson has spent the last 17 years serving on Boards and several committees of local, regional, and national storytelling organizations. In these roles, she has produced conferences, festivals, and events that featured diverse presenters, stories, and topics. She is honored to be able to put her experience to work to help NEST continue to thrive and help guide the organization into the future. In her 25 years as a storyteller and 18 years as teaching artist, 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. She also presented two workshops on finding and writing grants at the 2021 Sharing the Fire Conference. Knutson has received three Minnesota State Arts Board grants in partnership with schools to be their Storyteller-in-Residence. 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). She lives outside Minneapolis, MN where 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.