From the Ground UP, a nonprofit group based in Portland with a focus on fostering the creation of new art, is working on its upcoming season — and potential future decade — of programming.

The organization was founded by Katherine Murphy Lewis, a theater arts graduate from Southern Oregon University, in Ashland. After spending three years post-graduation traveling and living on Cape Cod, Lewis was drawn back to the arts with which she grew up, aiming to help others cultivate their works.

“My mom also had a degree in theater, and my dad was self-employed, working with computers,” Lewis told me via email. “From there, it didn’t take long before I enrolled in Lane Community College in Eugene. Lucky me, they had a gem of a theater department at the time, led by Patrick Torelle. His mentorship and influence were consequential in this early stage of artistic development. He saw me and my value. Eventually, I transferred to Southern Oregon University, per his suggestion.”

When Lewis finally landed in Portland more than a decade ago, she felt poised to launch into something new. 

“I recalled that, in college, the beloved Jim Edmondson was a key mentor in my life while I acted as assistant director under him for an original piece, Women of War,” Lewis began. “(He had co-created it with Hillary Tate as a blending of Greek Classics, Trojan Women & Iphigenia in Aulis, imagined as a protest piece performed by an all-women company.)

“While working with him, I asked him, ‘How do you become a director?’ He said, ‘YOU DIRECT.’ That always stuck with me, so in that effort, I began seeking out ways to direct. … Primarily, that meant creating opportunities for myself instead of waiting to get picked.”

After eight years of fiscal sponsorship, From the Ground UP became a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in 2023, during which time Lewis vowed to always remain a student in some capacity.

“I know that I always have more to learn, more places to grow into, and more pieces of myself and the work to discover,” she said. “This has taken me to some exciting places, including doing the summer training at Dell’ Arte in Blue Lake, California, in physical theater, mask, and clown, and being in residency with Company of Wolves out of Glasgow, Scotland, in which I worked and toured … for three months.”

In addition to her personal artistic achievements, much of the artist residency and outreach curriculum Lewis has developed over the years has been in response to her own training, with the goal of fostering spaces that welcome all children and artists:

“I was compelled to create a company, an artist residency, and a space that invites creators from all corners, not just professional artists. I believe creativity belongs to all of us, and behind all of my decision-making, program development, curriculum, and community and audience engagement is that effort and belief: YES, YOU BELONG HERE. YOUR STORY MATTERS.”

From the Ground UP is in the swing of its 2025 season, presenting its fundraiser campaign evening on Sept. 28 titled Capitali$m, Still A Bummer. Featured artists will include Lieana Petlewski, Aberdeen Stuart, Samantha Cruz, Katherine Murphy Lewis, Courtney Grant, and Andrea Parson, with tickets going on sale on July 15.

Early next year, From the Ground UP will also present Portland-based dance artist and former NW Dance Project company dancer Andrea Parson. Parson will perform her dance, physical storytelling, and comedy show You Can’t Be Serious.

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Read my full interview about From the Ground UP with Katherine Murphy Lewis below. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

ArtsWatch: What is your dance and movement background?

Lewis: I’m not a dancer in the professional arena, though I have trained in physical theater, viewpoints, and other movement-based practices within the theater world. My background is grounded firmly in theater. In 2021, in response to a desire and need to grow and evolve as an organization, From the Ground UP moved into a more multidisciplinary space, and through that process, From the Ground UP and I began to work with more dancers inside the residency and then Liminal Series.

This included directing and dramaturgy for the emerging shows like You Can’t Be Serious and, most recently, Grinding Coffee Beans. Both shows sit firmly in the space of working across disciplines (dance, storytelling, theater, stand-up comedy, etc.), creating new work that incorporates a variety of disciplines from the performance world.

Since moving into this multidisciplinary space, we have found several exciting collaborations, including our deepening partnership with BodyVox Dance Center. Through this expansion, we are able to reach and elevate more artists from across disciplines. As of now, we work solely inside the world of performing arts, but we are currently working to expand our reach into the visual arts sphere in 2026 in hopes of bringing resources, visibility, and a platform to artists working across disciplines. 

What is your theater background? When did you first begin acting and playwriting?

Theater goes all the way back to the beginning of me. At four, I saw a production of The Tempest at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in the Bowmer Theatre. My mom worked in the box office, so even though I grew up in poverty, or as my folks called it, “living very close to the edge,” we were able to go see plays at the festival due to my mom’s job (a gift that still continues to give to me all these years later).

“We were right at the front of the theater, and when Caliban entered from underneath the audience through the vom he passed us and I have this very clear memory of watching him climb up on the stage and fully merge with this magical world just feet from my little self, and thinking, “I’m not sure what that is, but I wanna do THAT.”

I had sworn off school after being such a “failure” in high school, not believing I was “college material” (a sentiment echoed by high school counselors). I was working at a juice bar in Ashland, and I heard about a playwriting class at Rogue Community College and decided to take it. This class lit me up, turned my head, and introduced me to my own love of learning and creation. I loved being in a college classroom where I had agency and could focus on a subject that compelled me.

What led you to arts organization and programming? What is your favorite part about it?

When I first landed in Portland, I volunteered for a theater summer camp for incoming high school freshmen. I was the lead playwriting teacher and created my own curriculum for that summer camp. I resonated with those kids very much, and we had such a magical time together. They were from all over the city, and after this camp, they were going to be dispersed back into their lives. I wanted to keep them together and make more shows, so the first evolution of From the Ground UP was created. 

That evolution lasted through their four years of high school, but when they graduated, I was ready to graduate into something new as well. It was 2016, and I wanted to work with an all-women/femme cohort, so the residency program launched. We started with our first cohort in January of 2017. Initially, the residency was just for folks 18-25, but quickly it became clear that we needed to be supporting stories by women/femmes of all ages, and by 2019, we had a multigenerational cohort.

During Covid, it became clear to me that it was time to evolve and expand the company; we had found such richness and engagement with the work created in the residency. More and more artists were finding their way to us, and I wanted to bring more visibility to the work coming out of these rooms and offer a space to expand the pieces created by our residents. And from there, the Liminal Series was created. 

There is so much I love about this work — the artistry of directing new work, experimenting with form, asking “why” to the invisible rules that often go unexamined … exploring the profound next to the mundane of our lives and the transformation that is available to us in the art-making process.

Ultimately, my favorite part is when I watch someone fully immerse themselves in the space of their own creativity and claim it as their own, as worthy of attention and time. Nothing can be more rewarding than that.

How do you choose your artists in residence? How many do you plan to host each year?

We select up to 12 each year with feedback from my board and our company apprentices (all of whom are alumni from the residency). We look at three key things: urgency, experience, and current needs based on what we have to offer.

We have an online application, and once that’s submitted, we invite folks to an in-person interview. Additionally, we recommend that folks take one of our intensives first to see if our programming is the right fit. For example, this summer I am leading SOLO, a week-long intensive focused on the early stages of creating solo work. We are partnering with BodyVox to offer a Storytelling for Dancers class, co-led by Andrea Parson.

Do you have a physical space?

Space, space, space — the forever struggle for small orgs like From the Ground UP to secure a home. We have the great good fortune at the moment to be a company in residence at the Historic Alberta House, offering us office, studio, and performance space.

We would like to secure a stable and steady home with the caveat that we don’t want our own building, primarily because of the cost and administration needed to successfully run a space. As the founder and leader of the organization, particularly in a time filled with such uncertainty, I want us to stay fluid and responsive and nimble and lean and able to adapt quickly — our ability to do all of which I would attribute to our growth and success over the past five years.

Do you plan to extend programming beyond Portland?

Yes, yes, yes. In the past year, touring Andrea Parson’s work, we have been able to bring programming throughout the PNW region, taking the show to Ashland, Astoria, and Hillsboro. And offering community conversations and workshops alongside the show has allowed us to more deeply engage these communities and begin to build long-lasting relationships.

We have ongoing conversations with folks at Southern Oregon University in Ashland and Ten Fifteen Theater in Astoria in hopes of continuing to bring our programming to these areas and beyond. Over the next five years, as we fully move into the next evolution of From the Ground UP, I hope we can build upon this momentum and expand our reach from it!

It looks like you work closely with artists in residence? Can you tell me more about that process?

Yes, Andrea Parson was a resident in the 2022 cohort. The first iteration of You Can’t Be Serious was presented in our annual New Works festival that year. It was clear from the onset that this piece was calling to be developed into a full evening of performance, and it was the perfect piece to pilot the Liminal Series with.

The content of this piece is deeply connected to the loss of Andrea’s sister to cancer in 2020. My dad had just gotten a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2021, just before Andrea joined the residency. I came on as director and dramaturge for the piece, and we presented the workshop in performance.

Just months after, I spent the summer with my father in hospice; his passing came on August 5th, 2022. After that performance, we decided to fully realize this work and present a world premiere. Having gathered both financial and community support through the workshop in performance, we joined together with From the Ground UP, co-producing the world premiere and tour alongside Andrea Parson. 

This process, which in many ways organically unfolded with You Can’t Be Serious and Andrea Parson, really carved a path that we can use for other artists moving from residency to the Liminal Series. Over the past couple years, we have also presented Andee Joyce’s work, Rhythm & Autism, and Asteria Howard’s Grinding Coffee Beans.

Do you have any plans to present your own work through From the Ground UP?

In fact, yes. For the first time since 2019, I will be presenting a new work, whose current working title is The End. It is a new solo piece that explores endings.

This project, grounded in my most recent loss, my father’s death due to stage 4 liver cancer — a 15-month journey meticulously documented, primarily in audio recordings, from doctors’ offices to late-night phone calls with my dad.

This piece lives in loss, as it is experienced individually and collectively. We have all encountered grief. It is an unshakable fact – the finality of loss, throughout our lives, is a wild series of endings that continue to shape us by ushering us into grief, the commons of the soul. 

We find ourselves, globally,  in the midst of incredible change and transformation. We are all grappling with some form of grief. It is here that we are most human and where the cracks let the light shine in. Grief is a full body, mind, and spirit experience, taking up permanent residence in our lives. This work does not explain or answer the question of grief, but rather, seeks to live inside the mystery. 

For this project, I will be collaborating with Julie Hammond and Amanda Gronich as a creative and narrative consultant, as well as a collection of artists yet to be selected. There will be a series of developments over the next six months with invited sharings, all with the aim of having a workshop in performance sometime in 2026. 

Where do you see the organization in the next 5-10 years?

I hope to deepen the work that we are doing. We would like to secure more long-term, stable funding, build a team of paid apprentices, and possibly add a new member to our company.

Programmatically, it looks like expanding the resources offered in our residency program, bringing forth more opportunities in our liminal series by increasing the number of artists served annually, and securing the funds to continue to offer subsidies and scholarships for all of our training and residency opportunities as well as maintaining our sliding-scale ticket policy.

Artistically, this looks like reaching more widely across mediums, including visual arts, and getting wildly curious about what happens when artists work across mediums outside of their experience. In this vein, although we will continue to center femme/nonbinary voices and stories, we are currently looking at ways to create space for stories and people who are also left out of the cultural conversation but don’t identify as femme.

Can you talk about your mission as seen on your website?

When we first launched the residency, less than a decade ago, we were the only organization regionally led by and serving women/femme individuals. I just think it is so fantastic that this effort has become much more widespread.

On our website, our updated mission statement reads, “We center femme identified artists (including non-binary communities) with the aim of offering opportunity to those who need it most.  By focusing on marginalized populations, we elevate sidelined voices, invoke important community dialogues, and support the creation and presenting of stories that are often overlooked. Knowing that by bringing these stories to the forefront we can create spaces that empower artists, invite the unusual, challenge norms, and forge new pathways that uplift individuals and communities both here and beyond.”

Who offers the workshops and training that happen during the “incubation” period of the artist residencies?

Our residency meets weekly from January through June, offering workshops led by me and my apprentice (this year that’s Asteria Howard). All weekly workshops are specifically for the residency and curated to support their developing works presented in our annual New Works Festival.

Can you talk more about the community engagement aspect of the organization?

So much of our longevity and success is tied to our community partnerships. From being a company in residence at the Historic Alberta House, to our ongoing partnership with BodyVox, to our new developing partnership with Tomorrow Theater. Each of these relationships goes deeper into the community here in Portland and allows us to engage a broader audience in our work. 

One ambition I have in the coming year or two is to more deeply involve the community in the art-making process. This would look like open rehearsal, community feedback sessions, and eventually putting together a community council of sorts, that has an ongoing relationship with the artists. 

Anything else you’d like readers to know?

We have just released two new videos capturing our impact with our alumni. I believe these reflections best describe our work and programs, as told by those most intimately familiar with them. They were produced as a part of our first grassroots fundraising campaign, with a goal of 150 new donors over the next four months in an effort to raise $20K. Although we have a financial goal, our primary focus is to capture new small donors and community members who are invested in, excited by, and want to support our work.