Katherine Krzys Papers

Katherine Krzys is a native of Connecticut. After graduating high school from Our Lady of the Angels Academy (Enfield, Connecticut) she attended Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, 1964-1967. She worked in a variety of positions for Connecticut General Life Insurance Company in Hartford, Boston, and San Francisco, 1967-1972, and World Savings and Loan in Oakland, California, 1980-1983.

Krzys attended California State University, Hayward (1973-1976), earning a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, with emphasis in Children's Theatre, in 1976. She also attended Arizona State University (1984-1988), graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in Theatre, with a specialization in Theatre for Youth, in 1988. She has extensive experience directing and managing operas, theatre for youth, and college theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area and Arizona and has worked professionally as a storyteller and puppeteer.

While at graduate school at ASU, Krzys began working with the university library's Child Drama Collection, specifically the papers of Sara Spencer, who established a publishing house in 1935 that exclusively printed plays for children. The Child Drama Collection developed from a need for a research collection to support a graduate program in theatre for youth at ASU. Lin Wright, former chair of the Theatre Department at ASU, facilitated the donation in 1979 of the teaching and biographical materials of Rita Criste, a founder in the field of creative drama for youth and a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. That same year the Children's Theatre Association of America (CTAA), the national theatre for youth association, donated its records to ASU. The ASU Library approved the establishment of the Child Drama Collection in 1980, with the purpose of creating a unique group of materials from individuals, theatre companies, and projects that have received awards from the national children's theatre association. In the early 1980s the collection expanded with donations from playwrights, theatrical artists, and retiring professors.

Intending to return to the San Francisco Bay area following her graduation from ASU, Krzys instead remained at the university at the invitation of Marilyn Wurzburger (head of Special Collections at ASU Library), becoming the part-time curator of the Child Drama Collection in 1985. One of her first projects with the collection was overseeing the transfer of finding aids from typewriter-generated paper guides to computer searchable indexes and contents lists.

Krzys' role in the Child Drama Collection expanded (she became a full-time archivist and curator in 1995) as she oversaw robust growth to the collection and facilitated major donations from leaders in the field of youth theatre. These included materials from Irene Corey (a pioneer in the field of costume, set, and makeup design), Lowell and Nancy Swortzell (founders of the Educational Theatre Program at New York University), and Jonathan Levy (playwright, university professor, theatre for youth historian and author). Including over 9,000 books nearly 300 periodicals and nearly 5,000 feet of archival and manuscript collections, ASU Library's Child Drama Collection is the largest repository in the world documenting the international history of theatre for youth.

While at ASU, Krzys also taught many classes and served as the curator for Rare Books and Manuscripts (previously called Special Collections) at ASU Library (2009-2019) and acting head of Archives and Special Collections (2014) and Distinctive Collections (2017-2018) at ASU Library. Katherine Krzys has received numerous awards from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, including the Campton Bell Lifetime Achievement Award (2016), the Lin Wright Special Recognition Award (2007), and the President's Award (2017). Krzys has also received major awards from the Children's Theatre Foundation of America, including the Corey Medallion of Honor (2016). She retired from ASU in 2019 and currently resides in Gainesville, Florida.