Lily Odekirk

Lily Odekirk is an Appalachian artist and scholar whose teaching focuses on drama-based and critical pedagogies. Her research and artistic practices engage with autoethnography, youth participatory action research, digital storytelling, and theatre for young audiences.

Across all of her work, Odekirk believes in the criticality of youth voice and agency. Recent projects include: co-directing I Come From a Place, an environmental storytelling project and community performance lecture with nonprofit Rural Action and Ohio University’s Chaddock + Murrow College of Fine Arts (Athens, Ohio); directing a two-year Performing Justice Project residency with Travis County Juvenile Justice (Austin, Texas); co-producing Notch Theatre’s Wild Home (Washington, Pennsylvania, and D.C.); and facilitating Drama for Schools/The Applied Drama Institute (Austin and Warsaw, Poland).

Odekirk was the 2025 artistic producer of the Cohen New Works Festival, and the 2024 recipient of the Don and Elizabeth Doyle Fellowship. Her documentary film project, Bearing Witness, an immersive meditation on three women’s personal relationship to healing, showed at the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine).