Abstract

Because the arts have become an increasingly interesting arena for twenty-first-century leaders, predominantly due to the opportunity they provide for arts leaders to work with the creative personality, this paper attempts to dissect and understand more precisely what is meant by “leadership” in the arts. More specifically, this study is an attempt to describe and understand some of the nuances of effective and ineffective leadership in theatre, and to more clearly delineate the unique characteristics of these leaders (as opposed to those in other industries). Toward that end, we conducted interviews with professionals in the theatre industry. The results were then sorted into a collection of recurrent themes and analyzed. The themes were categorized by leader “type” in the belief that such categorization would aid in the attempt, at the analysis stage, to understand in which situations each type of leader is most effective.