It’s that time of year again—when roughly 1,000 theater makers from around the world converge on a city for the annual Theatre Communications Group National Conference. This year, I was honored to receive an invitation from Clayton Lord, Theatre Bay Area’s Director of Communications and Audience Development, to participate on a panel entitled “Maximizing Impact: Modeling New Relationships between Artists and Audiences,” along with American Repertory Theatre’s Artistic Director Diane Paulus and prominent researcher, blogger and provocateur Diane Ragsdale.  [Read more...]

Several months ago, local playwright Stephen Spotswood and Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks asked me how much DC theater companies feel like they are in competition with each other, which led me to author this post on my arts marketing blog. [Read more...]

It’s been an exciting few weeks for us. For the second time in four years, a DC metro company has been honored with the coveted Regional Theater Tony Award, this time going to The Shakespeare Theatre Company, which in my opinion was long overdue. [Read more...]

When I first moved to Washington, DC to accept a position as the Director of Marketing and Communications at Americans for the Arts, I applied to be a Helen Hayes Judge to help learn about my new home city and to remain connected to the theater world.  I served as a judge for two years—one in the new play category and one in the musical category—starting in 2006. [Read more...]

A week before I departed Arena Stage, some in the community were up in arms about the announced future seasons in our city’s regional houses spurred in part by Peter Marks’ story in the Washington Post titled “In new seasons, D.C. theater companies will present the extremely tried-and-true.” Soon charges of “playing it safe” were coming from the Twittersphere. I even fielded one call from a press member who said “wow, three musicals next year! Guess you needed extra cash cows.” I guess it didn’t matter to that particular journalist that Arena Stage was in fact only producing two musicals in addition to three world premieres, but I digress.  [Read more...]