PR: TeenTix Welcomes Two New Employees in 2018
TeenTix Welcomes Two New Employees in 2018
(Seattle, WA) TeenTix is proud to announce that two new members of staff are joining the team this year: Leah Fishbaugh as the Director of Communications, and Mariko Nagashima as the Press Corps Manager. TeenTix builds a bright future for our city by empowering young people to take an active role in shaping their arts community as audience members, critics, influencers, advocates, patrons, and leaders. Filling these positions strengthens TeenTix’s mission and reach, solidifying the future of arts access in Seattle.
Leah Fishbaugh joined TeenTix in 2009 as a work-study intern during her freshman year at Cornish College of the Arts. After 4 dedicated years of stuffing envelopes and managing calendar data, she joined the TeenTix staff as the master of all electronic communications and administrative tasks--moving on to creating and editing blog posts, designing and distributing the weekly newsletter, and running TeenTix's social media platforms. As of January 2018, Leah now serves as Director of Communications, where her responsibilities have expanded to partner relations, outreach, usage tracking, and master calendar management (among many other duties)! When she's not glued to her computer, Leah enjoys performing and producing theatre, burlesque, and performance art, petting cats, and is an avid TV and Candy Crush fan. Leah holds a BFA in Musical Theatre from Cornish.
Mariko Nagashima joined the TeenTix team in February 2018 and is thrilled to be part of a program that provides such incredible arts opportunities for teens. Mariko’s role as the TeenTix Press Corps Manager combines many of her passions into one bright sparkly amazing job: working with teens, promoting arts experiences, and practicing critical arts journalism. Mariko is also a dancer, teacher, writer, and general enthusiast of all things dance related. She moved to Seattle in 2010, after earning a BFA in Ballet from the University of Utah, and quickly immersed herself in the Seattle dance world. She has performed with numerous local companies including Coriolis Dance and AJnC Dance-Theater. She teaches ballet to children, teens, and adults at several Seattle studios. Mariko was the Editor of SeattleDances, a website focusing on critical dance coverage, from 2010 to 2016, and was most recently the PR and Communications Manager at Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum.. She also currently runs PAPR: Performing Arts PR, which helps local, independent artists promote their work.
About the TeenTix Press Corps Program
The Press Corps promotes critical thinking, communication, and information literacy through criticism and journalism practice for teens. Since 2006, some of the city’s most talented professional arts critics from The Seattle Times, The Stranger, Seattle Globalist, SeattleDances and more, have taught over 550 teens through workshops and intensives focused on arts criticism training, resulting in over 450 reviews of arts and culture events that live on the TeenTix Blog. In 2015, we put the Press Corps on hiatus and worked with a task force of community members to address some of the program’s ongoing challenges, including lack of significant racial and socio-economic diversity amongst program participants, and staffing challenges.
The revitalized version of the Press Corps is designed to include racial equity and social justice priorities, and has an explicit goal of disrupting systems of oppression within arts media that have kept marginalized voices out of arts journalism. New program strategies will center around accessibility - including tailoring class location, time of day, and cost to a particular teen population, and working closely with schools and TeenTix Arts Partners and Community Partners.
About TeenTix
TeenTix exists to break down the barriers that prevent teens from accessing art in our community, such as ticket or admission cost, not knowing where to look for events, navigating transportation around the city, and feeling insecure around arts-going if there's no one in their lives already championing the arts. Our core programs, which have been developed in direct response to the barriers preventing teens from participating in the arts, include the The TeenTix Pass Program, The New Guard: Teen Arts Leadership Society, and the TeenTix Press Corps.
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