Joshua Ritter
Senior Lecture of Theatre Management/Theatre Manager
School of Theatre
Email Address: jsritter@uncg.edu
Phone: 336.334.4601
Biography
Joshua S. Ritter, M.F.A., Senior Lecturer/Theatre Manager, brings 19 years of experience in arts leadership and education to the 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 operations, community engagement, fundraising, and licensing for the largest academic theatre program in the Southeast. Josh mentors thirty-plus students on the undergraduate and graduate levels and teaches arts management-related classes each semester. Josh was a Coleman Entrepreneurship Fellow for the Bryan School of Business and Economics, and he is 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. Currently, Josh serves on the Executive Committee of the Board for Temple Emanuel in Greensboro.
In his earlier career, Josh was the Producing and Literary Management Intern for Sue Frost, House Management and Box Office Intern for Mary Miko, Assistant to Jefferson Westwood at the Rockefeller Arts Center, worked for “Wicked” on Broadway, was the Box Office Manager for the Dorset Theatre Festival, and served as the Drama Director and English teacher for a summer camp 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 published a journal article in the American Journal of Arts Management Teaching Notes proposing the need for a new pedagogy that integrates arts management, art content knowledge, entrepreneurship, and teaching skills to optimize the work of arts organization education leaders and managers. Josh offered a new course on this topic in 2022. Josh regularly presents at conferences on the research that led to the creation of the new course, arts entrepreneurship, and related subjects.