I arrived at Theater J in the aftermath of significant institutional crisis. The theater had lost both its artistic footing and its financial stability. My task was to restore trust, rebuild audiences, and reclaim artistic authority.

Within my first season, we achieved a balanced budget and embarked on sustained growth. But the real work was in the programming and the culture. Over my tenure, we grew the subscription base substantially, worked on a successful campaign to renovate both the theater and the institution in which it was housed, and restored the theater’s reputation amongst top performing arts venues in the D.C. region.

Expanding the Canon became the signature initiative of my tenure. I raised nearly $200,000 to commission seven racially and ethnically diverse Jewish playwrights to create new works centering Jews of Color—a deliberate act of expanding whose stories we tell and who gets to tell them. The initiative signaled that Theater J was a place where bold, contemporary voices would be developed and championed.

The Yiddish Theater Lab was born from a different kind of recovery: excavating and celebrating the masterpieces of Yiddish theater that had been largely forgotten in American Jewish cultural life. We produced seventeen readings and full productions, including the English-language world premiere of Mirele Efros—one of the most celebrated plays in Yiddish theater history.

During the pandemic, when most theaters shuttered, I created Classes for Theater Lovers—a series that brought theater artists directly into people's homes. The program generated life-sustaining direct income to DC theater artists during a period when work had evaporated. It also created a new revenue stream for the theater and deepened our relationship with our audience in profound ways.

By the time I left in 2022, Theater J had become the institution it was meant to be: financially stable, artistically ambitious, and deeply rooted in the community it serves.