NYTW Spotlight: Khalilah Elliott

This Community Spotlight features Khalilah Elliott, our extraordinary Interim Marketing Director for the winter and spring season. Khalilah joins us for a quick conversation about her work as an artist and arts administrator. Check out what she had to say!

What is your role at NYTW?

I am the Interim Marketing Director at NYTW (filling in for the inimitable Caitlin Baird who is out on parental leave).

What is your relationship to theatre/the arts and how has that influenced your work here at NYTW?

How much space do you have?! I am a life-long lover of the performing arts. I was a theater kid growing up, studied Theater & Communications in undergrad, and ultimately decided on a career behind the scenes after I got my M.A. in Arts Administration at NYU.

I grew up in a small, Southern city that didn’t really have an active professional theater so I fell in love with theater through PBS and reading plays on my own. That lack of access to the performing arts at an early age had a lasting impact on me and was probably a large part of how I winded up in marketing and communications. Even as a kid I was aware that my physical location and a lack of financial and emotional investment by the community’s leaders limited my ability to experience art in my own surroundings.

A large part of what drove me into arts administration was a desire to be a decision-maker who could help influence who gets to be included in the conversation and gain access to the arts. Working in marketing & communications specifically means I get to be actively involved in engaging people from all walks of life and to intentionally and purposefully work to draw in more people like me (who often have limited exposure to live art) as potential audience members.

What or who inspires you?

Everything! The people I love. The sun and moon rising and setting each day. The art in my life that moves me. It all inspires me! But young people, in particular, motivate me as a leader to do more, to give more of myself, to think outside the box, and to not accept “this is the way it’s always been done” as justification for disrupting the status quo. That’s what art is after all…an inspiration to disrupt the way in which we have previously perceived a thing. THAT inspires me!

What are you looking forward to in 2022?

Doing more as an artist myself. Producing. Writing. Exploring the world around me and finding a way to produce, present and promote art that is reflective of the people, community, and stories I love.

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Categories: NYTW Spotlight. Tags: NYTW Staff.