The Conferences and Fieldwide Learning Team at TCG is turning over a new leaf! We're bidding farewell to our dear Hannah Fenlon, associate director of the department for over four years at TCG, and welcoming in a new team as we usher in 2020 -- starting with a new opportunity for a Conference Manager.
I first started at TCG in 2012 as Conference Manager and over the years found a lot of room for growth, both through TCG's positional structure but also personally and professionally. I always offer this caveat when talking about our department but, while the word Conference denotes images of trade shows and Powerpoints, our Conference is different (though Powerpoints still happen, it's true). As an event that I sometimes call "a creative gathering for creative people talking about creating art" it's not your run-of-the-mill conference; last year Forbes shortlisted us as one of the most innovative conferences in the country. It's TCG's big annual production, and we do it in a new U.S. City every year (up next: Phoenix 2020 -- our first Conference in the beautiful deserts of the southwest!).
This person will be supporting the department as lead producer of the Conference, and manager of all logistical pieces, from soup to nuts -- while also working closely with me on programming curation. The role would be great for an emerging leader with producing or stage managing experience, used to handling multiple projects at once and with a super eye for detail, and an ability to gently lead a large staff and volunteer base on site. We often talk about how the folks in our department (even our interns!) uniquely use both sides of their brain on a daily basis -- the pragmatic, and the imaginative. Our department collaborates closely with a lot of the programming departments at TCG, as the National Conference is not only the annual manifestation of much of TCG's work, but also our yearly opportunity to interface directly with theatre practitioners from all over the country to get a feel for where we should be strategically focusing our service efforts in the years ahead.
If this role piques your interest, you can learn more about it here, and more about our programming process in this series of posts. If you want to learn more about the Conference, too, check out our Impact Reports from past years here. And finally -- if you have questions about any of this, reach out to me personally at dberkshire@tcg.org. Feel free to spread this far and wide -- and I look forward to hearing from you, or your people!
Pictured above: TCG Staff at the 2019 TCG National Conference: MIAMI. Photo by Jenny Graham.