Meredith Hoppe is a theatre artist and educator specializing in drama, puppetry, art for social and community change, and youth development. In Pittsburgh, Meredith currently serves as the Communications and Outreach Coordinator and Simple Interactions Trainer for APOST (Allegheny Partners for Out-of-School Time).
An active member of the arts community in Pittsburgh since 2010, Meredith has also been the Ensemble Director for HAT Co (Hope Academy Teen Theatre Company) at Hope Academy of Music and the Arts since her arrival in Pittsburgh six and a half years ago.
In addition, Meredith is a rostered teaching artist for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (trained in the WolfTrap method) as well as for City Theatre Company, and a guest lecturer at West Liberty University's Center for Arts in Education. She is also currently Project Manager for the Youth Voices grant-making initiative with The Pittsburgh Foundation. Previous to these roles, Meredith was the Program Director at MGR Youth Empowerment for 5 years, managing, teaching, and administering after school arts programs to over 1600 youth yearly across the greater Pittsburgh area.
Meredith’s theatrical work with Co(lab)trix, the teaching artist performance collective she founded in 2011, has been showcased at the Union Project and at the Penn Avenue Unblurred Gallery Crawl. More recently, Meredith collaborated with artists Anqwenique Wingfield and Julie Mallis to direct A Love Supreme, produced as part of the New Hazlett Theater's CSA Performance Series. She is currently developing a new performance piece, a tension, in collaboration with Pittsburgh composer and music maker Ryan McMasters, that explores the intersections of improvised sound manipulation, found object puppetry, and the unique rhetoric found in the online interactions of Kmart shoppers.
Before landing in Pittsburgh, Meredith served a variety of arts organizations in Orlando, Florida teaching theatre and digital media, stage managing, administering programs, painting scenery, as well as building and performing puppets. Her work has been presented at City Theatre's Young Playwright's Festival, Florida Theatre Conference, The American Alliance for Theatre and Education, and PSI: Performance Studies International. Meredith received her MFA in Theatre for Young Audiences from the University of Central Florida in 2010. Her current research interests lie in exploring avant-garde, non-linear, and devised theatre with and for young artists.