festivals & special events

While my communications team focused on their individual performance genre "beats," I typically took on the editorial for all Center-wide festivals and commemorations.

Scheduled at least once if not two to three times each season, these massive celebrations took over the entire Kennedy Center grounds, indoors and outdoors, for weeks at a time. Telling their stories and creating content for them typically involved writing across all genres and coordinating across many different departments. Here are just three examples: 

D.C.'s very first complete "Ring of the Nibelungen" cycle - Richard Wagner's epic saga of gods and mortals, giants and dwarves - drew crowds from around the world.

The direct mail piece I wrote included opera synopses, director introductions, calendars sliced and diced in various ways, media reviews, symposia and talkbacks, river cruises, menus, and more.

My favorite part? A family tree of all the characters, with which we also got a lot of traction on social media.

I also led the digital and artistic teams through the structure and content release plan for the Ring Cycle website, where all of these exploratory assets also lived.

The Center is not just host to performances. This particular festival immersed the D.C. and world community in music, theater, and dance as well as classic Cuban cinema, visual arts installations, fashion shows, culinary activities, interactive flora and fauna exhibits, and much more.

The elaborate booklet I wrote for the festival exploded into an expansive "culture catalog" detailing all of the exploration and fun in store. I worked with the digital and artistic teams to determine how the content played out on the microsite.