Performer at heart. Creative by nature. Arts leader in practice.
I started performing with BETA Club as a young girl and fell completely in love with it. My mom drove me to every audition and every rehearsal before I could drive myself — she made it possible before I even knew how to ask. She eventually started stage managing shows too, and we ended up in the same world from different sides of the curtain. Something about theater settled into my bones early. Thirty-three years later it still feels exactly the same.
The path back wasn't straight, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Life took me through retail management, running the office for a family pool construction business, learning how to keep things running when the margin is thin and the pressure is real. Years that looked nothing like a theater career from the outside. But I was learning things the whole time — how to lead a team, how to serve people well, how to build something that actually works. When I finally made it back to theater — really back — I brought every single bit of it with me.
What started as office manager and bookkeeper at HITS Theatre in Houston grew into stage managing, then business managing, then leading the entire development and marketing operation as Director of Advancement. Fundraising campaigns, box office, graphic design, financial management — all of it, often at the same time, often while also rehearsing for the show opening that weekend. It turns out knowing how a theater actually runs, from the books to the boards, makes you a very different kind of artist.
That depth of experience led naturally into consulting and design work — supporting performing arts organizations with the operational and financial backbone they need to grow, and building the visual systems that help them tell their stories. It's the same work, just from a different angle. I've always believed that organizations with creative souls deserve infrastructure that actually holds them up.