Emily Knapp | Consultant

Emily Knapp comes to Management Consultants for the Arts after 20 years making professional theater.  For the last decade she has served in arts leadership positions at organizations ranging from $200K– $55M, with special focus on community engagement, producing, season planning, casting, management, budgeting, and visioning/strategic planning. 

Throughout the last eight years, Emily has built engagement programming and mutually beneficial national and community partnerships designed to help arts organizations become truly essential to their communities. Most recently, as Associate Director of Public Works at the Public Theater, Emily led the creation of six years of ambitious participatory programming. In addition to year-round engagement with New Yorkers from all 5 boroughs, she stewarded four 100+ person productions at the Delacorte Theater (4 NYTimes Critics picks, 2 Obie Awards), the documentary Under the Greenwood Tree, and the projection installation The Seed Project.  She also oversaw Public Works National, a cohort of theaters working together to advance community-based theater within arts and culture institutions.  During her leadership, Public Works National expanded from three theaters to eleven, including The National Theatre in London and the Khaosiung Center in Taiwan.  Prior to that, Emily founded the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (HVSF) community-building initiative Full Circle, which is still creating participatory art today.

Emily has created program plans and strategic plans with numerous nonprofit arts organizations.  After seven years at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she also created two case studies for Stanford University Graduate School of Business on the OSF strategic planning process.  At The Public, OSF and HVSF, Emily served on play selection and casting teams, assessing plays, and forecasting producing budgets/needs.

On Broadway, Emily worked for Green Curtain Productions (The Color Purple, An American in Paris, and others) and served as Associate Director on Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way from OSF through its commercial run (Tony: Best Play, Best Actor – Bryan Cranston).   She has participated in 20+ new work development processes, alongside artists like Shaina Taub, Alan Menken, Benjamin Velez, Robert Schenkkan, Mary Zimmerman, Ping Chong, Kris Diaz, and others.  As an artist, Emily performed at BAM, OSF, Berkeley Rep, the Goodman, the Guthrie, McCarter, and the Wuzhen Festival (China). 

Emily has trained in DEIA practices and philosophies and was a member of The Public Theater EDI Task Force, responsible for creating its institutional EDI plan. She serves on the Board of Directors for avant-garde, bilingual theater ensemble, Caborca.  Emily has a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies from Harvard University. She was a 2016 TCG LeadershipU Fellow and is a 2023 Women inPower Fellow.