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Career Talk with Liza Zenni
During the following Knoxville Business Movers and Shakers interview with Liza Zenni, Executive Director of the Knoxville Arts and Culture Alliance, we discussed careers and the importance of marrying what you love with your talents and skills. I’m interested in the importance of finding what you love and focusing on that. It seems to me that you’re doing what you love. Would you agree with that? And how did you come to the position you’re in? It goes back beyond this position. I was working in San Francisco at a job not too dissimilar to this one. My husband died and I had a seven month old baby at the time. I stayed in that job for about a year after he died, then I quit to become temporarily retired and just focused on our children and being there for them. Then one day I went to pick up my second daughter, like six years later, from school, and she looked at me and said, “Why are you here?” and I thought, “That’s my cue! Time to go back to work.” So I started networking a little bit and there was an ad in the paper, just one ad, for this job. So I went into the office, unannounced, and talked with the staff and kinda got the scoop. I thought about it for a long time and decided to apply. It took them six months to go through the process, but the reason I was hired for this job is because of my past experience. When I started college, I remember someone giving us a speech and they said: “You are at a school that is not a specialized school, it’s more liberal arts, so use that benefit of being in a liberal arts environment. Take things that you have to take, but also take things that interest you and treat this as an opportunity to discover things about yourself.” And although I didn’t really follow that advice, it happened to me anyway at the beginning of my second year. It just kind of came to my door, and I found it. So that’s what I will tell my children when they go to college. When you’re at a liberal arts college and you have the opportunity to learn a little bit about so many interesting and different subjects, take advantage of it. Don’t just take the minimum hours. You’re young; you’ve got energy. Work it! Work it baby. You’ll be more likely to stumble on something that will turn an inner light on that will shine your whole life. And marry that passion, that love, that dream, to your inner sense of practicality. And then that becomes your career. I started college in psychology and at the beginning of my second year in school I had a roommate who was directing a graduate play and she needed bodies to be on stage and she talked me into it. She told me I could wear whatever costume I wanted to wear from a certain period in the costume shop. And I thought GREAT! I’ll do it if I can wear whatever I want. And so I picked out this teeny-tiny sized antebellum costume and the woman costumer whose job it was to make it fit my not too teeny-tiny body became one of my best friends.
What happened was I fell in love with the people in the theatre department and loved that work. I never officially changed my major from psychology until I was within six weeks of graduation with a theatre degree. I was hooked. I was completely and totally without a doubt hooked – on theatre, the process of creating it, but mostly on theatre people.
So I got my undergraduate degree in theatre, but eventually decided that I didn’t want to perform. I was just not built for that. Most young people think of theatre or entertainment as performing. They don’t know about all the other careers that are related to entertainment; and there are many, many, many more better-paying careers related to the production of theatre and television and film than there are performing. And so I ended up going to graduate school in theatre management.
I think between the time I got my undergraduate degree and I started graduate school I discovered something I didn’t know about myself, because I had to have a job to support myself and I knew I didn’t want to perform and be constantly auditioning and have the insecurity of performing. I got a job working in bookkeeping and accounts payable and then as a controller at a business in Oak Ridge in which my father happened to be a partner. I found that I had kind of a talent in it and I figured out: why should I not marry my talent and skills in business with an industry that I loved? I didn’t go to bed every night thinking about the business industry. I went to bed every night thinking and planning and being entranced with the theatre industry. So I thought, why not put the two of them together? Then I decided, ok, I’m going to do theatre management. I got into Yale and got a great education experience there. I mean I got a great education, but the experience was dynamite! When it came time to graduate I had three offers. By that time I was engaged, and was planning on getting married and having children. I did have one offer that would have been my dream job. It was to work at The Shubert Organization in NY which owns the majority of the New York Broadway theatres. I thought that that would be so exciting and so fun and so all consuming. But I also got a job offer from Theatre Bay Area in San Francisco, and there were three things that attracted me to that job offer. First was that my fiancé really didn’t want to live in NY, but he was more than willing to go to San Francisco. Second, I was planning a family, I was already thirty and I knew that if I went to work at The Shubert Organization in NY that I would eat, sleep, dream, breathe The Shubert Organization for the next ten years. Plus I would have to start at the bottom and climb my way up. I needed to get there faster, and I needed to have a more well-rounded life. And then the third thing of course was that in San Francisco I was being offered the opportunity to run a theatre organization; the position of executive director. So I jumped! I cut my management teeth on that organization. There were times it was harrowing because no one can teach you how to manage people, but I loved it, and I was there for five years. I really was very interested intellectually in the systemic causes and the systemic cures of the theatre industry and I felt like working with an entire community of theatres (when I left there were like 250 companies who were members) was much more interesting to me than working with just one theatre in one little place on this lane in this town. I was working with a whole ecology of theatres -- an eco-system if you will. So it was that experience that qualified me for this job. I think that the bottom line is that to a certain extent you follow your heart, but you also use your head. I mean I love performing, but I knew I wasn’t wired in the right way to be able to stand the lifestyle of a performer. So I developed a different set of skills and applied those skills to an industry that I loved.
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