Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 10 - El último sueño de Frida y Diego

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 64 What was your path to working at Lyric? When I got out of college, I was trying to figure out where I fit into the world. I moved to Chicago and had various jobs, and I was an arts administrator for the Axiom Brass Quintet here in Chicago. At the same time, I went to graduate school at Roosevelt for a master’s in arts administration with a focus in finance. My first jobs out of graduate school were simultaneously in Audience Services at Lyric and as an arts administrator for the Lake Forest Civic Orchestra. So your training is rather specialized. We covered topics similar to those in an MBA program, but with a nonprofit and arts-focused lens. We had marketing, finance, leadership. But those classes also covered topics like union contracts and collective bargaining agreements, tax-exempt status, the role of volunteer boards, and sustaining missions. To a certain extent, nonprofit finance is different from for-profit finance. You track restricted and unrestricted funds, contributed revenue in addition to earned revenue, and financials with net asset classes. What is the most challenging aspect of your job? When you’re doing budgets and forecasts in more conventional business situations, lots of activities can be similar year after year, growing in a much more planned manner. But opera is unique even in the arts. No single show is the same as any other show, and no season is the same as any other season. It’s just inherently complex. Can you describe a typical day? It’s not typical, but it’s cyclical — and the cycles are bigger than a day or a week. We operate in quarters. So when we’ve just completed a quarter, my day-to-day focus is very much interacting with every department and seeing how they’re spending against budget and what they anticipate. Around that, there are other points when we are super focused on budgets or long-range planning. My day becomes a lot of working with spreadsheets. What would surprise people about your job? I think it’s a common misconception about finance that we’re just sitting at our desks with our numbers. But we have deep relationships and constant contact with every department. Everything is interconnected — and it has to be accounted for by someone somewhere. What happens on the eighth floor is going to have an impact on the fourth floor, and vice versa. Looking through the patterns and puzzles that this creates is one of the beautiful things about this work. What do you enjoy about working in the arts? If you had asked me in high school what I wanted to do, I would have said I either want to do something with my trumpet or I want to study climatology — a tool combining history and math to forecast weather. I didn’t know that you could do math and forecasting work within the arts — that I could find a way to marry my interests in numbers, analysis, and music, and that I didn’t have to be on stage to still be contributing. That was a really important discovery to me. When something balances in my numbers and then I see it on stage, I get excited. It’s a very good feeling. People of Lyric A behind-the-scenes conversation Hometown Slidell, Louisiana When did you start at Lyric? September 2016 First opera you saw live? Il Trovatore , with Opera Grand Rapids. I was taking History of Opera as an undergrad. Favorite opera? I love Aida , probably because there’s a lot of brass and there’s those magical trumpets. Favorite performer? A Norwegian trumpet player, Tine Thing Helseth. A favorite moment at Lyric? I got to meet Terence Blanchard during Champion . I grew up where he’s from. Erin Johnson Director of Financial Planning and Analysis Kyle Flubacker