Manon van de Water (Vilas-Phipps Distinguished Achievement Professor) is the director of the Theatre for Youth Program in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She supervises and directs the annual Theatre for Young Audiences productions, which are committed to experiment with form, content and outreach strategies. Together with her daughter Karlijn Purdy, van de Water has translated numerous plays for young audiences from Dutch into American-English, several of which have premiered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Dutch Theatre for Children (New Plays Inc., 2008/Dramatic Publishing 2009), Moscow Theatres for Young People: A Cultural History of Ideological Coercion and Artistic Innovation (2006), TYA, Culture, Society: International Essays on Theatre for Young Audiences (2012, Spanish version 2013) and Theatre, Youth, and Culture: A Critical and Historical Exploration (2012, winner of the 2013 AATE Distinguished Book Award). Since 2008, van de Water has served as chair on the board of ITYARN, the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network.
