About the Director




Photo credits L to R: Debbie Goodpaster, JP Connelly, Jon Lipp, Jon Lipp
Katie Popiel has been clogging since the late 1980s, performing with and competing on various teams. She has been teaching contemporary American clog dancing in Tucson, Arizona since 2011, when she founded the Saguaro Stompers Clog Dance Company. She continues to teach, choreograph for, and direct that troupe in addition to teaching classes for the Tucson Clogging Connection. She loves teaching at clogging workshops in Arizona and California, and volunteers on the organizing committee for the Southern Arizona Clogging Festival held in January in Tucson. She also enjoys directing One Rehearsal Short, a comedic musical theatre troupe performing a new one-night-only show every other month. Some of her other favorite theatrical experiences thus far include dancing in a music video alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt, touring as the solo Irish dancer in Lonely Street Productions’ show, “Luck of the Irish” (2015 and 2019), and dancing in an international commercial for LG phones called “Everyday, Spectacular.” In September 2018, she was thrilled to place second out of 36 contestants in the inaugural edition of Oro Valley's Got Talent, at which Michael Kelly (nephew of Gene Kelly) christened her "the Duchess of Dance." She most recently won 1st place in the adult category for Tucson's Got Talent (March 2020).