Job: Executive director, First Person Arts
SCT degree: Bachelor of Arts in radio/TV/film 1990
Current city: Claymont, Del.
A piece of advice: “You have to be able to balance the vision and the creativity with the practical.”
Jamie Brunson has discovered a delicate professional balance, finding a way for the artist and the administrator inside her to both achieve their goals.
In January, Brunson was named the executive director of First Person Arts, a Philadelphia non-profit organization that supports the development of new memoir and documentary work. For the past 10 years, it has hosted the First Person Festival, a collection of real-life stories shared through theater, poetry, storytelling and other art forms.
It’s now Brunson’s task to create a vision for the future of First Person Arts and plan new programming. Brunson has been involved First Person Arts since 2010, when she participated in the First Person Museum, what the organization describes as “a community engagement initiative that showcases the stories behind treasured personal items in everyday people’s lives.”
But even with her history with First Person Arts, Brunson is spending the start of her tenure meeting with everyone she can as she formulates her vision.
“And I’m listening. Listening very carefully,” she says.
Even with her new responsibilities, Brunson still allows her artist side to find time to shine.
Brunson maintains a journal, in which she captures snippets from her life for potential plots or the beginnings of characters. She devotes her vacation time to fleshing out her journal into plays – which have brought their own set of accolades. Named a “New Voice in American Theatre” by the Edward Albee Theater Conference, her plays have been produced across the country.
Her latest work, All Over, is not your traditional family story. Set in a blues joint in Hell, it examines the relationship between a man who abandoned his family for a career as a musician and his son who died fighting in the Iraq war. The play has been produced a few times already, but Brunson has high hopes for its future; she imagines a national tour and a film version.
She’s excited to be a part of the burgeoning theater presence in Philadelphia and hopes to play a part in expanding its impact. “I think that Philadelphia has an amazing theater community,” she says. “As an African American person, I would like to see a lot more African American theater work and more black playwrights being done. I think those voices are very important.”
Brunson admits to “making a mess” of her academic career early on at another university, but says she found confidence in herself at the School of Communications and Theater.
“It changed everything,” she says.
