For years I lived and worked in Reston, Virginia, and got to know the place the way you only can when you work inside a community rather than just live in it.

Reston was a planned community, founded by Robert E. Simon (that’s where the name comes from, R.E.S. plus “town” ). In 1961, Bob sold his family’s property, Carnegie Hall, and used the proceeds to buy the land that became Reston. We used to joke that the best way to get to Reston was through Carnegie Hall. The arts were in the town’s DNA from the very first dollar. Public art was integrated from the beginning, and that dedication to cultural life continues today. I’m proud to have played a small role in it.

While I was running the Greater Reston Arts Center (a gallery in Reston Town Center, now known as Tephra ICA) I learned that our local high school had graduated a future NBA Hall of Famer. Grant Hill tore up the courts in Northern Virginia and eventually, and rightfully, had his jersey retired.

What struck me about Grant wasn’t the high school, collegiate, or professional success. It was what he did alongside it. Grant grew up with a love of the arts, and turned that into a serious passion for African American art. He became one of the premier collectors in the country, and sponsored a nearly three-year, seven-city tour of his personal collection called Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art.

His website describes this as “an atypical example of an athlete capitalizing on the incredible power and influence that is often left unexplored by professional athletes.” I’d put it slightly differently. I don’t think it’s rare for athletes to have artistic passions. I think it’s rare for us to ever find out about them.

Because once I started looking, they were everywhere. Serena Williams paints. Justin Tucker, the former Ravens kicker, is a trained opera singer. Etan Thomas, who played for the Wizards, is an accomplished spoken-word poet. The list is much longer than that, and I’m going to keep pulling on that thread in the months ahead, because I don’t think most people have any idea how deep it runs.

It shouldn’t be surprising. People contain multitudes. Almost nobody loves exactly one thing. But with athletes, especially the ones at the very top, we tend to see only the athlete and not the whole person standing there.

I carried that fascination around for years before I finally got to do something with it.

In January of 2021, in the middle of COVID, I created an event in Annapolis called Athletes for the Arts. It was a virtual fundraiser where the whole premise was to make the case for arts education by showing what it produces: more complete people.

The event was hosted by Julie Donaldson, then Senior Vice President of Media and Content for Washington’s NFL team. Six-time Grammy nominee Nnenna Freelon performed. And the two people at the center of it were former NFL players who had become artists.

Aaron Maybin was an All-American at Penn State, drafted eleventh overall by the Buffalo Bills in 2009, and played with the Jets and Bengals before walking away from football entirely. He is now a painter, an author, an educator, and an art activist in Baltimore. What he said about his career has stayed with me: “The goal wasn’t just to get to the NFL, it was to be an example like those that I idolized when I was younger. People that were transcendent not just in their sport but in culture, because they used their platform and their opportunity to be a voice for the voiceless.”

Eric Kettani was the other. A Navy fullback who never lost to Army or Air Force, MVP of the 2007 game that gave Navy its first win over Notre Dame in forty-three years, then five seasons in the NFL with New England and Washington. He left football to pursue his work as a self-taught artist. Eric’s story was a big part in why the event landed in Annapolis in the first place. He described what art does for him this way: “It decompresses you, it pulls that stress away.” And then he turned it toward the kids the event was raising money for, the ones who get to “pry those couple of hours away from their environment, for a canvas, singing, music or dance, just to step away and be themselves.”

The show won awards, and more importantly, it worked. It told a story I think the arts field needs to keep telling.

I suspect Athletes for the Arts will have another life. I’m definitely not finished with it.

However, here’s why it matters beyond the event itself. I wrote earlier about what the arts can learn from sports about opening up our process. This is the other half of that lesson. If we are willing to look, our audiences are in places we may not be exploring.

The arts field has a habit of imagining its audience as a fairly narrow kind of person, and then marketing to that real or imagined person over and over again. But the athlete in the front row might be a painter. The season-ticket holder at the arena might be the easiest convert you’ll find. People who go out, go out. They see plays, concerts, games and films, because they are curious about the world and they want to be in the room where something is happening.

We spend a great deal of energy competing for the audience we already have. We should spend more finding the ones we’ve never thought to ask.

Yesterday I settled into a table at Busboys and Poets on U street to meet a dear artist friend. He’s exploring an artistic leadership position and wanted to pick my brain about fundraising and I was more than happy to help.

As we got started, I realized this was one of the places where Capital Fringe was born. Back then I’d meet with artists here (the only Busboys location at the time), at Teaism down in Penn Quarter, or at the Warehouse Theatre (a venue that doesn’t exist anymore but deserves an entire article praising its critical role in our artistic community).

For just a moment, I felt like younger Damian again, working to build something new and exciting. I won’t lie, it felt great. Back then I was selling a vision to our community, sharing my passion for what was possible in our city.

I'm a more seasoned version of Damian now, but still thrilled to be supporting the artists I love. This time coaching an artist on something very similar to those earlier visits to this gathering place.

Early in the conversation I said something to my friend that I could tell he didn’t believe.

“As an artistic leader, you have the easiest job in the fundraising process.”

The look on his face made his surprise clear, so I explained.

The artist holds inside them the very thing a donor wants most. The idea. The spark. The vision. The why. I’ve come to believe that we give to the arts in order to get closer to the art itself, and to the vision behind it. And no one holds that vision the way the artist does.

Think about the difference between a ticket and a gift. Buying a ticket is, for the most part, transactional. We get the ticket, grab dinner, go see the show. Maybe we want to be entertained, maybe challenged, maybe we just want to escape for a couple of hours. But when a patron makes a donation, something else is happening. They’re not buying an experience. They’re trying to get closer to the art, and to the people making it.

As a development director, I can gesture at that vision and approximate it, translate it, carry it into a room. However, I will never be able to share it with the power the artist can. The artist is the source, so in that specific and important way, the artist has the easiest job in the whole process. They already are the thing everyone is reaching for.

What I encouraged my friend to do was think about his role as a creator beyond the closed doors of the rehearsal hall. To see himself as the key to bringing supporters closer to the work. To lead the process of opening those doors and pulling back the curtain on why he’s doing this show, why he’s curating this season, why any of it matters to him. Because in the end, those are the stories that build passion in a community.

We talked about the practical ways to do it. Open rehearsals. Preshow emails. Opening nights. Artist talkbacks. Every theater in town does some combination of these already. But here’s the thing I’ve noticed. Not all of them actually pull back the curtain. So often we’re just going through the motions, doing what we’ve always done, without stopping to ask the only question that matters: what do we want someone to walk away with? What should they feel, or understand, or carry home that they didn’t have before? The activity isn’t the point. The intention behind it is.

I gave him one concrete suggestion to take with him. Block off a dedicated time every week, and simply call a few supporters. Don’t ask for anything. Just talk with them about what’s happening behind the scenes, what the theater is reaching for, what’s alive in the rehearsal hall right now. This small, proactive, human connection, when practiced week after week will have a ripple effect in the community.

Looking for these opportunities to share the why brings our audiences a little closer to the work and the art. We leave them with a picture, an idea, or a feeling about our process that they didn’t walk in with.

Do that, and you’ll build more passionate supporters and more durable support. Because what a donor is truly looking for is connection to the art.

And that may be the easiest gift we have to give.

I remember receiving a gift that made me cry.

It wasn’t anything the donor said or did. My tears came later, in a private moment, with no one around to see them. I cried because that gift arrived at exactly the moment my organization needed it most, and because it represented something bigger than the dollars. It was faith. Trust. A tangible sign that someone believed in what we were doing. That is what a gift can be, when we let it.

I have been fundraising my entire nonprofit career. It came easily to me, and as I got older, it became something I genuinely enjoyed. So I’m always a little surprised when someone tells me, “I could never do what you do.” To me, it always made sense. I was working on something I believed in, and the donors believed in it too. They showed me that through their giving, and in a hundred other ways that had nothing to do with money.

Over time I came to understand something. It isn’t fundraising that people are afraid of. It’s their own beliefs about money and relationships that get in the way. A decade ago I wrote a book to try to demystify the process for artists, to free them from those fears so they could be more successful in their work. Writing about artistic process these last few weeks got me thinking about that book again, and I realized something I hadn’t seen so clearly before.

So much of what ails the arts comes from a single instinct: we close up. We’re afraid to share too much, to let people in, to be seen before the work is ready. We do it with our process, guarding the rehearsal room like a secret. And we do it with our fundraising, hiding our needs as if needing were something to be ashamed of. But in both cases the cure is the same. Open the door.

Look closely, and you’ll see that nearly every fear we carry about fundraising is really a fear of opening up.

We tell ourselves, “I don’t know any donors.” But underneath that is a reluctance to let our own community see what we need. I think the megaphilanthropists feed the illusion, the MacKenzie Scotts and Bill Gateses signing away their fortunes, making donors feel like a rare and separate species. Yes, they are donors. Most giving comes from the people already around us. We need to widen our thinking to include everyone already engaged with our work, and open the door and invite them in.

We tell ourselves, “All they really care about is the tax deduction.” I used to assume this too. But this is a way of closing off, deciding in advance what other people care about. Most donors aren’t giving for the write-off, they’re giving because they want to support something they believe in.

We tell ourselves, “There are only so many donors to go around.” This is a scarcity mindset, the sense that there is one pie and we’re all fighting for a slice. It closes our imagination before we’ve even begun. The reality is that potential supporters are everywhere, all at different stages of knowing and caring about what we do. The work isn’t to fight over a fixed pie, it’s to open more doors, so more people can discover the work in the first place.

And we tell ourselves the big one. “If I ask, they’ll be offended.” We carry so much fear around the ask because we’re afraid of the no. Sure, a no is possible. But the elaborate rejection we build up in our minds almost never matches reality. This fear, more than any other, is the fear of opening up. And here’s the good news: we don’t have to guess what someone is thinking. We can simply open that door, have the conversation, and find out.

When I went back and reread my old book, I was struck by something else I had written, beyond the fears we carry. A list of who donors actually are.

Donors believe in your work.
Donors want your project to succeed, and they want to know they helped.
Donors share your vision of the world.
Donors need to give.
Donors come from all walks of life.
Donors want to feel close to you.

Notice the difference. The fears all live inside us. The truth about donors lives out in the world, in real people who are waiting for something to believe in. A decade ago, I led with the fear. Today I’d rather lead with this. When we open the door, we stop listening to the fear and start meeting the people.

I am leaving this writing today carrying one idea with me. Most every problem we have with asking begins the moment we close up. So I won’t. I encourage you to be equally open.

Believe in what you’re doing, open the door, and let people in.

I was new to the city and just out of college. Young and enthusiastic, but also green in the field and lonely in the community. I poured myself into my work and that theater every day because I felt the value in what I was doing, but also because I didn't have a lot else to do while I built relationships in a new place.

I would work late often. There was always something to do. One of those nights happened to coincide with an evening rehearsal of this Tom Stoppard play that we were premiering on the East Coast. I knew nothing about Sir Tom at the time, or his illustrious history in the theater. Honestly, I didn't know much about theater or the process at all. I didn't study theater, didn't attend an art school, didn't do anything that gave me deeper behind-the-scenes knowledge beyond a few high school musicals.

For some reason, that night I decided to slip into the back of the house for the rehearsal. The set had already been installed and the stage was lit, but the house was dark. I remember feeling invisible in that back row, like a silent witness to something I wasn't quite meant to see.

Blanka Zizka was directing, and she was on stage with the performers working through a specific scene. I know now that Stoppard's writing is beautiful but demanding, and that it asks a great deal of its performers. That night, the artists were fully dedicated to finding the voice of the show. I watched take after take, actors exploring different variations of a phrasing, while Blanka deftly guided them toward something truer. Everyone was so locked into the moment, so committed to making the scene work. And there I was, silently watching it unfold. I got to see where it started and how it took shape. And not only the how. I got to hear the why. Actors and directors talked through the motivations of each beat, what they believed their character was feeling in that exact moment.

That was my first real awakening to the power of process. I slipped out just before they finished, back onto Broad Street, energized by what I had just witnessed. Newly addicted to this company and this show.

As I look at the field now, I long to share that feeling with our audiences. That specific, electric experience of being a silent observer.

It could be as simple as opening our rehearsals and letting audiences be exactly that, a silent observer. Give them a chance to truly experience the work that goes into a production. To see firsthand how much an artist wrestles with a single phrase. How much attention goes into a monologue, how much deliberation goes into a single lighting cue.

I have been part of plenty of initial table reads, where designers share their visions and actors explore the script for the first time. Those are fun events, and they have their place. But they always felt a little staged to me. I want people to see more than that. I want them to see the rawness of creation, the nakedness of a process that is unaware, or unconcerned, that it's being observed. Because that is the sacred thing, the part we tend to hoard. Watching people make something while they are not performing the making of it.

If that is the start, imagine going further. Audiences watching artists labor over a single scene for two hours, seeing where they begin and where they arrive by the end. Then, imagine those same people in the seats on opening night and watching to see what survived or what changed. To witness the journey and then the destination. I can't think of a more powerful way to turn someone into a true believer.

I want this because I remember how exciting it felt to me. I want others to feel that same pull. To slip into the dark, feel invisible, and walk back out onto the street changed.

In 1994 I fell in love with soccer because the World Cup was in the United States for the first time. It served as a distraction for me while other things in my life were not going well. I dove fully into the teams and the players. Back then there were preview magazines you could buy, and I had every one of them. I memorized as many details about the people and countries involved as I could before a single game was played. I got to know the personalities: colorful Mexican goalie Jorge Campos, Italian striker Roberto Baggio, Bulgarian star Hristo Stoichkov, and of course the American team filled with players I vividly remember today. I also remember watching the final between Brazil and Italy (I had settled on the Azzurri as my favorite by then) and feeling like it was such a terrible game, like it didn’t live up to everything that led us there. It didn’t matter. I was hooked.

With the World Cup back in the United States now, I can’t help but think back on those days and on how impactful that experience was for me, both personally and professionally. When I got to college, I started house managing at the performing arts center on campus and fell in love with meeting all the artists we brought in. The arts felt like sports to me. I got to experience them from behind the scenes, and I felt the inescapable draw of these artists and their stories.

I started my career as a publicist for The Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia. Since it was my job to pitch news stories, I began to see a hole in how the arts presented themselves, one that the sports world had figured out brilliantly: focusing less on the final product and more on the process.

It’s safe to say that sports teams have dedicated fans. They tune into every game, travel to support their team, and talk about every aspect of it with friends and colleagues. But if you were to look objectively at the quality of each individual game or contest, I suspect you’d find that the vast majority of them are not of the highest quality, like that 1994 final. Sure, there are moments and exceptions, but not every game can be a barn burner with high stakes and endless action.

And here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Fans stay rabid through the mediocre games because their investment was never only in the game itself. Sports figured out long ago that opening the doors to the stories and the players behind the scenes is what builds the bond. Fans develop emotional ties to players and franchises through a deeper understanding of process. It shows up everywhere. Who is showing up to training camp? Will they make the team, or get cut? Is that draft pick going to pan out? That player went to my college and I loved him there. Did you see what the coach said in that press conference? There are countless moments we get to experience with our favorite teams, and every one of them deepens our investment.

Like many in the arts field, I have been lucky to experience our shows from the inside. I got to meet the casts, sit in on rehearsals, and witness all the work that led to putting a show on stage.

But our audiences rarely got to experience those intimate and illuminating moments. And often, the closest look inside was reserved for our most significant donors.

Collectively, we are hyper focused on the final product, on what the audience sees after they buy a ticket and attend a performance. That focus matters, and magical artistic experiences are happening every single night.

But this approach may have made more sense in an earlier era, when society did more to teach us about the art forms themselves. People grew up with some understanding of what ballet was, or why a piece of classical music was so layered. We don’t have that shared baseline anymore. Our audiences no longer arrive at the same starting place we do as artists, and without that common ground, the whole thing starts to feel transactional. Buy a ticket, and the show had better be great. Don’t take a chance on something you’ve never heard of, because you don’t know what it’s about. We have lost the on-ramp that used to bring people into the work, and we haven’t built a new one.

I think we are missing an opportunity to develop rabid fans of our art, and the fix is to open up our process a great deal more. To bring our followers behind the scenes far more often, and to let them be part of the act of creation. To let them truly understand who the players are, why they are taking the risk, and what they are trying to achieve with this particular work of art.

I’ll dive into how we might actually do this, alongside everything else the field is juggling, in future posts. But for now, while we get absorbed in the world’s game being played in our own backyard, I want to posit that the sports world may have already solved how we expand our dedicated audience base. We just need to open ourselves up to the examples they have been giving us all along.

It’s good to be back. Not that I went anywhere. I’ve been here all along, supporting artistic creation, sometimes from the sidelines and sometimes more directly, cheering it on and getting out to see as many shows as life’s constraints allowed. But it’s good to be back in the DC arts community in the way that matters, with my whole heart.

For the last year I’ve been the Director of Development at The National Theatre. I feel lucky to be part of such a historic organization at such a pivotal moment. I played a role in helping the theatre’s Foundation purchase its iconic building. For the first time in its 190-year history, the second-oldest theatre in the country is safely in the hands of the nonprofit dedicated to its preservation and care.

It’s the third time I’ve been part of a key moment in a theatre’s physical history. When I first came to DC from Philadelphia, I helped Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company move into its home at 7th and D. Literally, by driving a rental truck of office furniture down 7th Street, and figuratively, by building the audiences for the opening and beyond. I was at Arena Stage when it moved out of its old offices to make way for the expansion that transformed it.

This is my community, and it calls to me consistently. I’ve worked outside the arts and done good things in those roles, but the arts sing to my soul.

A few weeks ago, Dito Van Reigersberg passed away. I worked with him, and like countless others, I felt his impact. The artists at Pig Iron and that whole singular community left a lasting impression on me, personally and professionally. I won’t eulogize Dito. Others have done that, and better than I could. But his passing stirred something in me, a pull to bring the artists and the art I love back to the forefront of my life.

Because the truth is, lately I’ve noticed how much of it I talk about in the past tense. I miss sitting in the auditorium at The Wilma watching Blanka direct The Invention of Love. I miss watching the Oscars with Tom Stoppard. I think about the nomadic seasons at Woolly Mammoth, performances leaping from the Kennedy Center to the DCJCC. My heart fills when I remember the artists I supported at Capital Fringe, with aerialists in the rafters, dance at the Building Museum, and twenty-four hours of Dana and Matt painting the Warehouse Theatre.

Philadelphia, DC, even Annapolis. Every one of those places formed memories that brought me to this moment. And I don’t want to keep missing them. I want to be present. I want to be an active part of this world that has given me so much joy.

So I’m going to get out even more. See shows, go to openings, connect with artists and friends and colleagues. But I know I can’t physically be everywhere, and I don’t have the time or the energy I once did. So I’m also going to write here, turning my thoughts toward the local and national arts community to scratch that itch when I can’t be there in person.

I want to write about my passion for works in process, something that’s been a through-line from the very start of my career. And I want to share my philosophies about fundraising for the arts, in the hope of helping our community build more of the work I love to be in the room for.

I look forward to making new friends and new memories. Don’t hesitate to reach out and tell me what you’re working on. And thank you, in advance, for welcoming me back.

It’s good to be in the room again, watching a show take shape.