Spotlight on Arts Administration: My Summer at New York City Ballet
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2018-03-27
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During the summer of 2016, I interned with New York City Ballet in the Membership Department. Located in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, NYCB is a world-renown ballet company known for creating the first originally “American” style of ballet. As with all performing arts companies, a strong development department is imperative to a ballet company’s ongoing success. In my position in Membership, I trained in the Tessitura software system, which NYCB, the Metropolitan Opera and other companies use in order to keep track of donor contributions and relations. I used Tessitura regularly for my first project, where I assisted in updating donor listings for the 2017 season Playbill. Not having worked with large data systems before, I used the critical thinking abilities I developed at Mount Holyoke and the computing skills I practiced in Psychology Statistics to creatively manage this task. In addition to other administrative responsibilities, I also learned how to write appeals, which entailed online research and interviewing a Company choreographer. In this panel, I will discuss the learning curves I experienced in arts development, and how networking helped me to obtain my dream internship.