 Thank you so much. That did set us up really well just beautifully Thank you all for coming. It's great to see you all some of you I know some of you I am looking forward to getting to know better My name is Jane Wenger, and I'm a freelance drama Turk It's sort of like going to an AA meeting I'd like to welcome howl around here and welcome everyone out there I know some of you and the rest of you I'll end up getting to know you to through the rest of my freelance career, and okay. Can you hear me now? I'm always afraid of being a little too loud I live in San Francisco, and I work Anywhere they'll have me I have quite a few jobs here and there that run concurrently and we'll talk about those later I'm going to do our introductions with my esteemed Entrepreneurs, I want to sing you a little song. I'm just kidding My name is Nekisa at a mod. I'm a drama Turk producer and director and translator based in San Francisco I specialize in new plays and musicals, and I delight in all kinds of collaborations I'm the former drama Turk and literary manager of San Diego Repertory Theatre San Jose Repertory Theatre and the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia And now I am the your executive VP of freelance and the regional VP of Metro Bay Area for LMDA So thanks for coming to our panel Hello, my name is Amy Handelsman. I'm a freelance drama Turk. I Know Beth actually from when I worked at the Mark Taper Forum Which is now called Center Theatre Group with the other two theaters. I freelance now I was in Los Angeles for 21 years. I started in theater in New York. I went to work in film and television in Los Angeles I Created a department at the Taper CTG under the auspices of showtime to work with playwrights who wanted to get into cable television and film and Let's see. What else do I do? I'm an artistic counsel the O'Neill. I've consulted for a lot of theater development Places. I have carved a little bit of a of a specialty in Playwrights moving into other areas or adapting from other media. Hi I'm Sean Renee Graham I'm originally from San Jose, California and made my way east to pursue studies in dramaturgy I started my career as the literary associate at at Hartford Stage Company where I When some play development programs Mostly the voices reading series, which was a free series on Monday night and sort of got my feet wet with Producing sort of by by doing that Then I came to New York solely as a freelancer and started my own Consulting firm all creative rights, which is providing artistic services to individual artists Helping them raise money helping them market themselves that kind of thing and also script development work with with new writers I work at the field as the artist services manager in which I spend my days Helping all artists from all disciplines lead create develop sustainable lives for themselves I'm the literary director at the classical theater Harlem And I'm the resident drama target something called the American Slavery Project, which is commissioning African-American writers to respond to slavery in America. I am Don Coopler. I'm in Canada. I Came very late to dramaturgy and had no formal training in it I was working on my MA in English literature and I finished the coursework for the PhD in English literature in Saskatoon I got a Canada Council grant to finish my thesis I Bought a van and went to the east coast of Canada because all my friends are going to Vancouver. I Didn't really work on my thesis end up working to fish plant went to live with another couple on an island and work with them for nine years Building a house and eventually through this whole process working on a newspaper and fishing Got interested in community theater. I went from community theater to do my MFA in directing at York and coming out of that started to freelance as both a production Gopher eventually a production manager and a dramaturge within the theater and then have continued that cycle currently I've landed in Vancouver where I am Instructor in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and I freelance as a dramaturge primarily in the development of dance and New plays but also do production dramaturgy as well Thank you. I didn't mention that my work is Specialized in in new work only I've specialized in new work working with directly with the playwrights or a group of collaborators as it's being developed Since the pretty much the beginning of my career. I came up in my early years in New York, I was the artistic director of a group here called women's ensemble and In San Francisco. I was the artistic director of an organization called the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation I have a wide range of work that is appealing to me I work a lot with solo performers I directed an opera and dramaturged an opera in January that I absolutely love doing I also really like working with dance theater a lot and spoken word theater So those are some of the longer. I'm in the business the more exciting Things seem to fall my way But I don't think it's by luck I think it's by making our own luck and creating our own situations by What is appealing to us what we want to get better at? Who we want to spend our time with and so it's really about Also just being able to stay It's find a way we're gonna talk today about finding a way to make this business something that can also pay our rent Be able to let us pay off our college loans and how we can stay in the business That's rewarding as an art to us, but also how do we make that happen? So we'll see what kind of answers we have for you and what kind of answers you might be able to add on to this so I'm interested in how my fellow panel members got into this field and You sort of answered that a little bit About saying That that wasn't what your intention was from the beginning So I'm gonna pass my mic to Nikisa and say how did you how did you get into this business? Was it your original intention and how did you know that you wanted? To be a dramaturg and did you know what that meant? Does this work too? So I had spent a year of study abroad my junior year in college at UC San Diego in Paris studying really crazy subjects in French like semiology psychoanalysis film theory Some theater classes and at the University of Paris toa that's the sort new new Bell Sorbonne But anyway, I came back to school and I thought oh people in Paris live lives of art and it's okay So I came back and auditioned for an acting class that was too full and the teacher did five-minute interviews with us and He asked me what I had been doing and I told him about the classes. He said do you know what a dramaturg is? I said no, he said you'd be a very good one come work for me And he was the associate artistic director at San Diego Repertory Theater Todd Salovey who's still there And so he became my mentor I was his literary intern and then I became his dramaturg for the first show he ever directed there this was back in 92 I think and So I started my career as a freelance dramaturg while finishing my undergrad degree then applied to the NFA program And did an MFA and dramaturg yet you see San Diego and when I graduated they eventually created a position for me And I was the resident dramaturg and artistic associate. So being at different regional theaters enabled me when I moved to London for a Short time that I could start a freelance career. I had made enough connections. And so that's how I'm Doing the work now. So that's how I started How did I start? I went to a school that I thought had a drama department and didn't which was Harvard and Maybe they do now. I don't know. So everything that I did was outside of academia and I Wanted to work in the entertainment business that was as specific as I knew I didn't go to graduate school Somebody gave me good advice and set it a good way to learn about what aspect is to work at a large-scale talent and literary agency My first job was on a desk at ICM and I learned a lot there I freelanced as a story analyst. So I was working for Paramount and Warner Brothers and and UA and some smaller companies Reading books and going to theater and and doing coverage meaning writing about their dramatic possibilities for film or television I had a terrible breakup with a guy and went to Los Angeles And to see if I could work there because all of the story development jobs were there I paid a lot of dues in Los Angeles. I worked there for 20 years not realizing that as a story executive or a creative executive or producer I basically was a dramaturg for those for film and television and then I Got the perfect job working at a theater but involved with film and television the taper job Which doesn't I have never existed before I'm trying to create it to see if it can exist again I liked what Jamie said about the entrepreneurial spirit. I mean ambition. I grew up You know women were still not supposed to be ambitious, you know on that old but The thing is when working in Hollywood, I mean what what I basically did was work with writers developing material, which is what New play dramaturgs do but I also really really had to learn how to be entrepreneurial within the studio system because you know all those jobs maybe every job involves selling so you have to be able to To pitch you have to be able sometimes to figure out how to raise funds, you know How to market it to an audience all that sort of thing So I ended up being not a reluctant dramaturg, but I ended up sort of backing my way into it from other forms I didn't think I could make a living in theater. I Do now I do now, but I also think it's easier when you have sort of hybrid skills And it's appealing to me not just to have my own business But actually call it a business as opposed to you know Just being put myself up for hire somewhere as an independent contractor to say this is a business I think we'll get into it later about you know treating yourself as a business But I think you have to be scrappy still, you know And I agree I've given you know, I think a lot of freelancers have a hard time You know making a contract for doing a certain amount of work. You love the writer You love the project you end up putting in a lot more time and you know, you end up having financial problems Thank you very much before Sean Renee gets started Could someone go around and pick up those questions off the table for us, please And um, thank you Amy and I really like the idea of Continuing to talk about it as a business that really segwayed with what Jamie said and we will get back and talk about that some more Uh, I started out wanting to be an actor director type and as an undergrad I was at Cal LaFornia State University Los Angeles and at the end of my Time there, uh, I ended up taking a criticism class with someone by the name of Susan Mason who, um Was very involved with dramaturgy and doing projects in that capacity And I started doing the writing assignments and she said You should be a dramaturg because the way you're talking about this work that you're seeing is so thorough and you know thoughtful That um, uh, that's a the direction. I think you should go in and then she at the time she was also the Editor of theater journal and she said, um, I want you to start seeing stuff around town And start writing about it because eventually I want to publish something of yours and I had just never really thought about it Honestly and um, so I ended up writing an article about the actor's gang And their production of voidsack and she published that This summer that I graduated from Cal State LA Um, and so then I took an internship at the mark taper forum. The world is so small with Oliver mayor and Frank his last name Dwyer. Yeah And I spent about a year there just reading scripts Working on some of the play festivals there And Oscar Eustace was there at the time a lot of different people were going through there Tony Kushner was writing angels in America. It was just an amazing time to be um, uh, at that theater But I also knew that I wanted to since I was getting so much experience with new play development that I wanted to um Get more classical training, which I didn't really have