Stage Management

As a stage manager, you're the unsung hero of the production world—the glue that holds everything together behind the scenes. But when it comes to showcasing your skills, your LinkedIn profile can become the ultimate stage for your professional brand. Here’s how to create a LinkedIn profile that will not only get you noticed but also highlight the unique talents that make you a backstage superstar. 1. Start with a Standout Headline Your headline is the first thing people see

So when I began my PhD journey, it was very important to me that, along with whatever academic outputs I managed, I wanted to create something that had the potential to impact the industry. It’s one thing to write a PhD thesis that like 10 people total might ever read about how care ethics and care aesthetics should influence the way risk management for participatory audiences is considered (riveting sentence, right?). And another to take the tools I’ve been learning throug

Stage managing can be a difficult job to balance with anything else. The hours are long. You don’t always know exactly when you’ll be needed. And you may be nomadic – out on tours, cruise ships, or hopping contracts to where ever the next place is that might hire you. And early career stage management jobs might not be paying quite enough to cover all the bills and all the Starbucks you need to function like a human. Top tips for stage management side hustling: Asynchronous

I’d like to pause in our regular programming and take a minute today to talk with you about one of my favorite annual events that is happening this weekend. The Broadway Stage Management Symposium . This event is an incredible opportunity for stage managers at all stages in their careers. To this day, I am still flabbergasted that the awesome organizer of the event found my silly little blog and has invited me to be a little piece of this event since 2017. The symposium d

So I’m a little behind this year, but I thought we could do our bi-annual dig into the Stage Manager Survey Report . You might be wondering, what is the Stage Manager Survey Report. Run by David J., McGraw, the report has been happening since 2006 in an effort to better share info about the industry with other stage managers. As a recent graduate in 2006, I can confirm, there was not a huge stage management community at the time. There was the absolutely invaluable SMNetwor

I’ll admit that I don’t think LinkedIn is the main way to find jobs in the arts, but as someone who does some hiring, I would find it a little weird if someone didn’t have a LinkedIn. I also do some solid stalking of other stage managers career paths. I find folks doing the jobs I want to be doing and look at what they were doing a few steps before. So what to focus on when creating a LinkedIn profile. Let’s start simple. The first thing anyone sees is your profile photo a

It’s been a while since I wrote much stage management content, so today I thought we’d take a break from personal finance and I’d ramble a little bit about the absolutely insane dreams that sometimes accompany some shows. I recently worked a fairly high stress festival on minimal sleep for the week and I have found that this week, as I recover from that exhaustion, I can’t stop dreaming about work. I literally fall asleep and it feels like I’m back there in the booth, doing

**This is a sponsored post.** I am an early holiday shopper. I bought my first Christmas gift of the season in July and as I type this, I’m about half done with my 2023 Christmas shopping. So it doesn’t seem super crazy to me to think about holiday shopping in October. I like spreading the expense out over several months rather than one big hit in December. I also just really enjoy keeping an eye out for the right things for the main people I buy Christmas gifts for. And

I was recently thinking about one of my favorite parts of stage managing and for me, it has definitely been travel. You get to be a part of some of the most exciting productions in the world, working with talented performers, designers, and technicians to create unforgettable experiences for audiences. One of the biggest perks of the job, however, is the opportunity to travel. Whether you're on tour with a Broadway show, working at a regional theatre in another state, or even

May is right around the corner and it makes me think of being a shiny, new graduate. What an absolutely freaking terrifying exciting time! As a new graduate stage manager, I remember the challenges that come with navigating the financial landscape after graduation. It can be overwhelming to figure out how to make ends meet while pursuing a career in the arts, especially when facing the high costs of living in major cities where most theater jobs are concentrated. I remember

For the last several months I’ve been working very part time for my supervisor’s theatre company here in the UK. Between balancing school, my part time digital workshop work back in the US, and the theatre company… I wasn’t really doing alright. I had to talk to him about quitting at the end of my contracted period. That group has had several funding issues and as I was talking about not renewing my contract, he said “hopefully we get this next round of funding and we can b

**This is a sponsored post.** Sponsored post-ness aside, I do love Etsy. I’ve mentioned my fairly unhealthy and potentially bankrupting love of candles several times on this blog. And Etsy is on to me with their candle gift guides . I also like it for unique and personalized gifts. I’ve used it as a go to for cast and crew gifts many times (disclaimer: I absolutely do not think you ever have to give cast and crew gifts and this very much depends on your financial state, s

Friends, let me tell you a story about the power of a thank you note. Around the time Ringling Brothers closed, my resume floated to the top when Cirque was kindly trying to help rehome a lot of unemployed circus workers. I was not currently an employee at Ringling, but somehow my resume got flagged and I got invited to interview. I didn’t know why, but of course I took the interview . Working for Cirque is literally the last of two things on my stage management bucket lis

So I have been in the process of starting a doctoral program, working a freelance corporate events job online, and sorting a move across an ocean for several weeks now and a last minute delay with one of my visa items has left me in the United States for a few extra weeks. Like any sane doctoral student I thought, what I need to do is more. Clearly I should try to stage manage something before I leave. The logistics of this get quite squicky once I move to the new country on

Full disclosure, I do not receive any affiliate kickback promoting the Broadway Stage Management Symposium, but I have been involved in both the expo and on panels in the past – so I am clearly a bit biased towards how awesome it is. Today I want to talk about the Broadway Stage Management Symposium . In case you are unaware, it’s a gathering of pretty much the coolest people on the planet (stage managers) with a variety of panels and keynotes that focus on various aspects

I was a very slow adopter of iPad technology. A few years ago I worked on a show where my ASM was all about. She did all her notes on hers, regularly accessed documents, and would call the show (which is still a pretty hard no for me, but to each their own on that front). I had a little extra money and the same show used Stage Write for all its blocking, so I decided it was time to make the investment and I bought a 7 th generation iPad after much debating back and forth ab

So I’m back home from my first show since the end of the pandemic and before I left, I was struggling a little bit with how to balance the healthy habits I’ve built in the many months of not working with how life is while out on a contract. I’d developed several really good food and exercise habits during the pandemic and as it came time to head off to the hotel for this contract, I was struggling a little with how I was possibly going to maintain them. There was no pool to

I was looking up some SEO information on Stage Management – for my non-blogger friends out there, that’s how to optimize for searches and found that one of the most commonly searched phrases is Stage Manager Job Description. And it got me thinking. It’s kind of a hard job to define, isn’t it? If you’re American and Equity, there is some guidance on what your job consists of – but even then, a panel I realized enjoyed at the Symposium a few years ago was about keeping up mo

A few weeks ago, I went on a bit of stage management specific tangent about anchoring and priming effects from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I’m still thinking about this subject, but today I want to reflect a little on how, as performing arts workers, we get anchored in the starving artist mentality. Just to review, anchoring is when an individual relies too heavily on an initial piece of information when making future judgements. I think for many

Today’s post is all stage management, friends, sorry, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled personal finance and sometimes moaning about life shortly. So my day job does a lot with apply cognitive behavioral science to selling techniques and a book that gets mentioned a lot at work is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. After several weeks of hearing the book mentioned, I decided I wanted to read it. It’s a pretty fantastic book, though it’s definitely not light r