Allison Watrous
Executive Director – Education & Community Engagement

Allison Watrous is the Executive Director of Education at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, which has been her artistic home for the past 20 years as an educator, actor and director. Allison and her team manage a wide variety of educational programing, which serves more than 142,000 students per year.

Allison is a collaborative leader of artists, teaching artists, actors, and educators and an innovative teacher who is passionate about working with students of all ages. She is an artful developer of new curriculum that explores using theatre as a springboard to teach various subjects. Allison has taught at The New Victory Theatre, The New York Film Academy, TADA!, The Buckley School, University of Northern Colorado, the National Theatre Conservatory, The International College of Beijing and the University of Denver. She is currently on faculty of Denver School of the Arts and the University of Colorado Denver.

Acting work includes Kelly Young in Just Like Us, A Christmas Carol, John Brown’s Body and Scapin (Denver Center Theatre Company); Girls Only - The Secret Comedy of Women (DCPA Cabaret); Astronomical Sunset (Curious Theatre Company), and Savage in Limbo, Crimes of the Heart, American Notes, Talley’s Folly and Gidion’s Knot (Sis Tryst Productions)

Directing work includes Bus Stop (Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities), The Revolutionists (BETC), Brighton Beach Memoirs (Miners Alley Playhouse), Big Love (University of Denver), and Failure: A Love Story, The Laramie Project, Eurydice, Wintertime, Arcadia and The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Denver School of the Arts).

Allison studied at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Theatre Institute, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre at Drake University and a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in Acting from the National Theatre Conservatory.