Katie Hammond
owner & creative director
Katie is a certified Human Resources Generalist, who specializes in People Operations. She values the interpersonal relationships above all and focuses her training on encouraging active listening and hands on interaction. She believes that culture, communication and community are the paramount building blocks for a successful working environment.
She utilizes her 15 year background as a professional improviser to adapt and creatively shape the dynamic of her training groups. She is the head teacher of Musical Improv at The People’s Improv Theatre in Manhattan, and strives to infuse humor into her sessions to keep participants focused and engaged. A Michigan native, Katie earned a BA in Theatre from The College of Wooster in Ohio. She moved to Chicago to study and perform improv at The Second City, iO and The Playground Theatre. She relocated to Florida to improvise full-time at Disney World, and was an ensemble member of SAK Comedy Lab in downtown Orlando. Katie is the Artistic Director for musical improv company This Is Your Life; The Musical and she tours the country with Broadway’s Next Hit Musical. She is on two house teams at The People’s Improv Theatre (VERN and What Town? The Musical) and is a company member of The Story Pirates.
Katie has delivered trainings for a wide variety of clients, including; NBC Universal, TwitchCon, BlackRock, MOO, Lonely Leap, IntraLinks, Microsoft, AstraZeneca, DropBox, American Museum of Natural History, HP, National Grid, The Basta Project, WorldQuant, Cleary Gottlieb, Millennium Capital Management, and Walt Disney World Resort.
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Geoff Grimwood is a New York-based, Chicago-raised actor, improviser, and communications coach who has worked in improv since 2002, Studying and performing at the Second City, improvOlympic, the Peoples Improv Theater, Upright Citizens Brigade, the Annoyance, the Barrow Group, and William Esper Studio. Geoff’s taught classes and corporate workshops on behalf of the Second City, the Peoples Improv Theater, Manhattan Comedy School, unARThodox, the Barrow Group, and the London-based Bi-Jingo!, designing and facilitating workshops for Google, Facebook, Amex, Amazon, Oracle, ConEd, Deutsche Bank, Match.com, LinkedIn, and clients across the country.
As a performer, Geoff improvises with the 1940s sci-fi radio show X Plus One, and produces and performs in the improv duo Grimwood & Grimwood with his teenage son, Otto, and the improvised religious service (of an improvised religion), Fake Church.
Geoff Grimwood
facilitator
Stephanie Rae is a career applied improv practitioner who is passionate about amplifying diverse voices. She’s guest played with everyone from ComedySportz to the Groundlings, taught improvisers from Louisiana to Liverpool, and worked with members of Broadway’s Freestyle Love Supreme as a facilitator for FLS+. As founder and president of the Black Improv Alliance, she’s created free programming for improvisers of color worldwide and has worked with corporate clients including the onePULSE Foundation, The Executive Leadership Council, SC Johnson, and YouTube, among others. She also has a law degree from Georgetown - but mostly uses it to win arguments online.