To try and sum myself up in a sentence: I am a theatre producer, performing arts manager and new media evangelist.

I am currently acting deputy editor and Off-West End editor of Whatsonstage.com, the UK’s leading theatre website.

As well as instigating social media development and experimentation within the organisation, I regularly write news, interviews and features for the main site and our Off-West End section.
I manage the press night diary and assign reviewers to productions around London as well as editing and uploading text, images, audio and video content across the site.

Whatsonstage.com is the UK’s leading theatre website, receiving over 500,000 unique visitors per month and generating almost 5 million page impressions. With an incredibly loyal theatre club membership and an annual people’s choice theatre awards, Whatsonstage.com is the UK theatre bible.

I graduated from Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in July 2010 with a First Class honours degree in Music, Theatre and Entertainment Management and was awarded the Young Presidents Prize for outstanding contribution to the Institute by a Management student.

Having grown up in Edinburgh I was drawn to the city’s annual Fringe Festival and whilst growing up took on a number of mainly technical and stage management roles for independent producers bringing work to the Fringe, working in venues such as Underbelly’s Iron Belly, Paradise Green’s Greyfriar’s Kirk House, Diverse Attractions and Underbelly’s Caves.

I built on these experiences, my people management skills and a number of years of front of house and box office work to take on a senior management position with C venues at the Fringe in 2008. I continued working with C venues in 2009, my sixth year working at the Fringe, and led the venues’ ticketing operations as box office manager. Overseeing a team of 30 box office staff, I am very proud of how hard the team worked, selling in excess of half a million pounds worth of tickets in an eight week period, on behalf of C venues’ 160 shows.

At school I was a devoted singer, gaining my Associates Diploma in Musical Theatre from the London College of Music (Thames Valley University) in 2005. Although my performing days are very much behind me, I remain incredibly passionate about musical theatre and particularly the development of new work. When given the opportunity to undertake three month academic placement as part of my degree I worked as a production assistant for Perfect Pitch Musicals and Andy Barnes Productions from September to December 2009.

Whilst on placement with Andy I was lucky enough to be involved in the showcase productions of four new British musicals in the annual Perfect Pitch Showcase and a one night concert performance of Through The Door, both at Trafalgar Studios. My work also included supporting ongoing productions of Over the Threshold during its transfer from the Edinburgh Fringe to Jermyn Street Theatre and The Great Pretender at Upstairs at the Gatehouse.

Whilst working for Perfect Pitch I was commissioned to write the project plan for the Perfect Pitch Songbook, the first such sheet music publishing project to be undertaken by Perfect Pitch. I am very pleased to say the songbook was produced in Spring 2010 and is now available through theatre book retailers such as Dress Circle in London’s Covent Garden.

I have spent a number of years discovering the potential of new media, particularly niche content podcasting. I was one of the first podcasters to create and distribute content from the Edinburgh Fringe, hosting the Whispered Prompt Podcast in 2006.

My new media creation and social media marketing skills were put into practice when I became station manager of Re:place Radio, the reincarnation of LIPA’s radio station, as an assessed project during my second year. Starting from the ground up, I led a team which developed the station from a live-to-air streaming station into a network of 15 podcasts and blogs.

We successfully developed a new listenership for the station and I used the project as an opportunity to learn the Drupal content management system, building the site from scratch and maintaining it for two consecutive seasons of broadcast. I have since built sites using WordPress as well as experimenting with the Tumblr platform.