Research & Scholarship
I study how young audiences experience, interpret, and make meaning through theater.
My research grows from more than twenty years of work as a director, choreographer, educator, and producer. Creating theater for young audiences has led me to questions that cannot be answered through artistic instinct alone: What do children notice? How does movement shape their understanding? What makes a theatrical world accessible without making it simple? How do we invite young people to become active interpreters rather than passive recipients of a story?
I am currently pursuing an EdD in Theatre Education at New York University. My research brings theatre for young audiences into conversation with aesthetic development, audience studies, learning theory, movement analysis, and arts-based approaches to inquiry.
At the center of both my research and artistic practice is the belief that: Accessibility does not require simplification.
I am interested in how artists can give young audiences multiple ways into a theatrical experience while preserving complexity, ambiguity, and room for their own ideas.
Current Research Interests
My current reading, writing, and research explore children’s development as aesthetic viewers; movement and choreography as forms of meaning-making; the relationship between theatrical clarity and interpretive freedom; and the ways young audiences notice, question, and revise their understandings of a performance.
I am particularly interested in what changes when we regard children not simply as an audience to engage or educate, but as thoughtful viewers who actively construct meaning.
Selected Scholarly Work
Building the Sandbox
Article manuscript in development
Building the Sandbox considers how theater artists can create worlds that are clear and accessible enough for young audiences to enter while remaining open enough for imagination, interpretation, and discovery.
Drawing from my directing practice, the article examines how movement, staging, design, and ensemble storytelling establish the boundaries of a theatrical world without determining everything a child should think or feel within it.
From Measurement to Invitation
Research developed through doctoral study in learning theory, 2026
From Measurement to Invitation: Abigail Housen’s Research Agenda in Aesthetic Development and Its Implications for Theatre for Young Audiences examines how Housen’s study of visual-art viewers might help us think differently about children as theatrical audiences.
The project considers how artists and educators can invite young people to observe, interpret, support their ideas, and revise their thinking- rather than guiding them toward one predetermined understanding of an artwork.
Children, Youth and Performance Conference
Emerging Ideas Roundtable, Toronto, 2026
I presented developing research on movement, children’s aesthetic experience, and audience interpretation at the Children, Youth and Performance Conference. This marked the beginning of sharing my emerging research agenda with a broader community of artists, educators, and scholars working in theater and performance for young people.
Research in Practice
I approach research and artistic practice as part of the same ongoing inquiry. Ideas from scholarship return with me to the rehearsal room, where they shape how I build an ensemble, choreograph a transition, clarify a relationship, or decide what a production should explain and what it should leave open.
Theatre practice, in turn, continually generates new research questions. My goal is to contribute language, frameworks, and documentation to a field whose work is often temporary, embodied, and difficult to preserve—and to advocate for children as capable, imaginative, and active participants in theatrical meaning-making.