Joshua S. Ritter, MFA, brings 17 years of experience in arts leadership and education to UNC Greensboro School of Theatre. Josh is passionate about creating and maintaining an inclusive, collaborative, and respectful space where theatre practitioners can work to the best of their abilities. His responsibilities include managing marketing, front of house, development, licensing, and the financial aspects of an academic theatre program. Josh mentors thirty-plus students on the undergraduate and graduate levels and teaches arts management-related classes each semester. Josh is a Coleman Entrepreneurship Fellow for the Bryan School of Business and Economics and the head of the Theatre Management Minor degree.
Before coming to UNCG, Josh served for nine years as the Education & Library Director for Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, CT. In this position, he reinvigorated and vastly expanded Goodspeed’s Musical Theatre Institute, wrote the program notes for Goodspeed Opera House productions, and worked with a team to create Goodspeed’s educational documents and multi-level lesson plans based on state and national standards. Josh also managed an array of educational programs and a team of teaching artists offering arts education and arts-integrated workshops on the K-12 levels throughout CT. His other accomplishments included working to expand the Arts Education Collaboration from one school in 2009 to eight schools in 2018. Josh also assisted in producing Goodspeed’s annual Festival of New Musicals and sensory-friendly performances.
Josh is honored to have served on the Connecticut Early Music Society board of directors and the CT State Library Advisory Council for Library Planning and Development. In his earlier career, Josh worked for WICKED on Broadway, was the box office manager for the Dorset Theatre Festival, and served as a drama director and English teacher in Madrid, Spain. Josh holds an M.F.A. in Theatre Management and a B.A. in Theatre and Arts Administration with a Minor in Philosophy. Additionally, Josh has presented at several national conferences to propose the need for a new pedagogy integrating arts management, art content knowledge, entrepreneurship, and educational best practices to optimize the work of education directors at arts organizations. Josh offered a new course on this topic in 2022.