Prior to becoming a member of the board of directors, I worked with Pointless Theatre Company to develop an Adaptive Impact Plan, in lieu of strategic planning. Adaptive Impact Planning is something I developed in the course of writing my Master’s Thesis, Your Mission if You Choose to Accept it: Strategic Planning in a Nonprofit Visual Arts Context. You can read the full text of my thesis, available under a Creative Commons license, here.
My process with Pointless involved a month of individual interviews with key staff members , as well as group conversations with the full company of performers and the board of directors. The areas we discussed included:
The Mission
Target Impact
Target Audience
Current Audience
Current Programming
Target Programming
Current Impact and Effectiveness of Programming
Audience Expectations
Core Competencies
Key Obstacles
From there, we developed an Adaptive Impact Plan. We established five priorities, with the input of the company, which ranged from artistic excellence to paying artists a living wage. We then wrote six questions to guide decision-making. As new opportunities arise for the company, they can review these six question to determine whether to move forward, ensuring at all new activity aligns with their priorities without rigidly imposing a traditional 5-year-plan structure on the company.
User testing for the Housing Authority of Baltimore City website. Research was done collaboratively with Matthew Branch and Jaqueline Iyamah. I was specifically responsible for the Visual Clarity and Employing PDFs findings, as well as all of the Resources for Next Steps and Summary of Recommendations sections.
In its 30th season, the theatre completed the transition from Washington Shakespeare Company to WSC Avant Bard to Avant Bard Theatre. To align with this change, I’m working on a full rebrand for the company. One element of this is a redesigned logo intended to better match the way that theatre leadership is thinking about the work the company does. For Avant Bard, a focus on classics doesn’t limit itself to ancient classics or the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries — it includes other established greats, like Tennessee Williams, and “new classics”: modern pieces with characteristics that put them among the more traditional canon in caliber and importance.
Here you can see the final logo, as well as each step of the design process:
This gallery is eight images documenting my logo design process.
This is a passion project of mine tied to a secondary instagram account — Sects Sell is a series that takes my interest in cults, true crime, and coercive control and combines it with my passion for retro ads, signs, and illustrations. You can view the full series on my instagram account, but I’ve posted some favorites below.
I created these podcast covers as part of Lauren Hom’s homwork challenge.
Wine and Crime is hosted by three friends — Kenyon Laing, Lucy Fitzgerald, and Amanda Jacobson — and they get drunk and talk about true crime. Living the dream, amiright?
The Sinisterhood Podcast is hosted by two Dallas-based comedians, Christie Wallace and Heather McKinney, and it focused on a different true crime, cult, or creepy topic each week.
I’ve designed two shirts for Team Brunette — half of a fundraising organization called Blondes vs Brunettes DC, which raises money for the Alzheimer’s Association. The shirts are sold to team-members and their friends and families as an additional fundraiser. Gallery
Scripts in Play is an annual staged-reading festival that Avant Bard produces to feature scripts that engage with the past through a unique lens. The details for this year’s festival are here.Gallery
This project was a full evaluation and proposed redesign for the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Center for Information Technology Services. Research and writing was done collaboratively with Monique Jenkins and Zoe Skinner.
The paper below outlines our full process, in roughly chronological order, in an effort to clarify our thinking and demonstrate its basis in research. You can also view a PDF of our final presentation.
Techniques and processes:
The report below goes into further detail, but some elements of our research and ideation process include:
Conducted content inventory, incorporating Google Analytics data
Performed card sort testing, employing OptimalSort
Performed tree testing, employing OptimalSort
Each member of my team had hands on each of these tasks at some point and I am proficient in all of the software listed above.
Major Contributions:
Proposed the concept our final navigation, discussed in SECTION 10 through SECTION 14, which we subsequently fleshed out together
Developed criteria for competitive analysis and selected competitors
Wrote SECTION 4 | Competitive Analysis, SECTION 6 | Preliminary Site Map and Wire Frames, SECTION 10 | Modified Site Map, and SECTION 13 | Summary of Recommendations
Avant Bard Theatre’s 30th season contains 3 shows that represent the three stages of the company’s development — Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to represent it’s early days as Washington Shakespeare Company, Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams to represent the canon it included in its time as WSC Avant Bard, and Ada and the Engine by Lauren Gunderson to represent the new works it considers modern classics. You can view the season here.
