Katie Hawthorne is a writer, researcher and journalist. She lives in Edinburgh, where she recently completed her PhD in digital technologies and "liveness" in performance. Her doctoral work has been presented at international conferences and public talks in the UK, Germany, Czechia, Poland and China.

Katie was the lead researcher and author of the European Theatre Convention's 'Digital Theatre - Digital Strategies and Business Models in European Theatre' study, and presented this research at the European Theatre Forum in 2023, informing the 2023 Opole Declaration.

As a journalist, Katie writes for publications including The Guardian, CRACK magazine, The Scotsman, the Stage, The Observer, Dazed Digital, Fest, and many more. She specialises in writing about live performance and creative technologies, and won the Allen Wright Award for feature writing at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Katie's fellowship at the Academy was the beginning of her work as a creative researcher; she will present a third iteration of her interactive installations in 2023, drawing on her Academy project.

Since May 2022, Katie has been a part-time member of staff at the Academy. Together with programmer Armin Luschin, she made the Portal (a re-launch of the Academy's documentation platform previously known as WIKI), and works with each new Fellowship to assist them in documenting and disseminating their research and discoveries.