Arts Administration Major
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About the Major
Arts administration focuses on artists, audiences and community stakeholders from diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives. The arts administration major encompasses core coursework, mentored internships, and sequences from business administration and more than 20 arts-based majors and minors to create a strong foundation for a self-sustaining career.
Jobs in Arts Administration
- Studio owner
- Director of development or finance
- Marketing manager or agent
- Box office manager
- Grant writer
Past Elon Arts Administration Internships
- Blumenthal Arts
- The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
- The Muny
- Parsons Dance
- Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts
Related Majors
Hands-on arts administration experiences prepared graduate for Kennedy Center job
By the time Morgan Engle graduated from Elon University in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in arts administration, she had already interned at two arts centers in North Carolina and helped organize and manage a daylong dance workshop for high school students. In the classroom, she had practiced negotiation simulations, learned about marketing and taken courses in a variety of arts genres.
So it’s no wonder that she secured a job at one of the most well-known performing arts centers in the country after graduation — the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. — and was promoted after a little more than a year.
The preparation during her undergrad years for life outside the classroom was invaluable, she said.
You can never experience working a full-time career until you are, but you can be as prepared as possible, and I do think Elon left me as prepared as possible.
Growing up in a musical family, Engle always loved participating in the creation of art and performing. When she was looking at colleges, she heard positive things about Elon’s arts administration major and realized that the school and the major were the perfect blend of what she was looking for.
“As someone who grew up engaged with the arts, I wanted to stay in touch with the field,” she said. “The arts administration major at Elon sounded like the perfect way to blend the environment I wanted to learn in and all of the focuses that I wanted to keep close to me. It was possible to do it all there, and I feel like that is something that I saw as pretty unique, that I could carve my own path and make sure that I’m staying in line with what’s important to me.”
Carving your own path is practically a hallmark of the arts administration major at Elon. Students are required to complete a set amount of internship hours and take a mix of arts and business courses, but they are free to choose from more than a dozen arts majors and minors to concentrate their studies. They can focus on, for example, photography or drama, theatrical design or piano pedagogy. Engle graduated Elon with two minors — one in theatre arts and another in communications. But she also was free to take a multitude of other arts courses.
Having such an open opportunity to experiment helps students narrow their focus, said Engle, who advises incoming arts administration students to “not be afraid to try it all, because you’ll never know what speaks to you,” she said, adding that she appreciated that Elon gave her the room to think through all of the different job possibilities that can come from an arts administration degree.
“Something that I love is that you get to choose your emphasis, the art you want to focus on, but in hindsight, it was just as important for me to learn about all of the forms of art such as dance and art history,” she said. “They ended up being just as impactful and influential on my studies and on who I am as a person today.”
There were intricate courses that gave her new perspectives, like Art As Therapeutic Process — “what does that mean and how does that relate to the programming that I could potentially be doing one day?”— and negotiation and contracting simulations that she has already applied to her job and “leave you with an air of confidence being introduced to the things that you’re going to be seeing in your field.”
Engle also got multiple opportunities to get hands-on experience while at Elon. In the fall of her senior year, she interned at the nonprofit Alamance Arts, working in communications and event planning, and in the spring of her senior year, she was a marketing intern for the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in Greensboro, where she worked on promotions and advertising campaigns for Broadway tours, concerts and various other shows.
“It was a really cool opportunity to see how art works in a community,” she said. “I valued the fact that I was able to pinpoint what experiences I wanted to try out.”
She said she believes the experience she gained through the internships helped her get the Kennedy Center job after graduation — for one, the internships gave her experiences she could relay in job interviews.
“Employers want to know how you handle real-time situations in the workplace,” she said. “I was able to provide examples from both internships that revealed the way I would handle high-intensity moments as an employee.”
During college, Engle also had the chance to experience what it’s like to devise, coordinate, promote and manage a full-scale arts event. As a part of her senior seminar course, she and her classmates, with the leadership of associate professor David McGraw, helped create “Discover Dance with Elon,” a daylong workshop for two dozen high school students to participate in dance, arts administration and photography masterclasses.
The internships and senior seminar took learning to another level, Engle said; the knowledge she gained was not just from textbooks and lectures but was “also taking everything that you’ve learned and putting it into action with actual people, actual engagement,” she said.
After graduation, in August 2022, Engle started work at the Kennedy Center as a special events assistant, and in January 2024, she had the opportunity to transition to the coordinator role on the Theater Programming team, the area of arts administration that has most aligned with her interests.
In D.C., she’s seen first-hand how connected Elon is with the performing arts community — and how helpful that is in the arts world.
“You’re working in the business of people and in the business of connections at its core, and I think one of the most beautiful things about Elon is its widespread network,” she said. “Already, I have engaged with several co-workers who attended Elon. You’ve had the same home for four years, and that is a great way to connect.”
Did You Know?
- The arts administration major is designed for students interested in building self-reliant careers or leading arts organizations or creative-economy businesses.
- All majors complete mentored internships, including study abroad and Study USA options such as the West End and Elon in LA.
- The arts administration program at Elon envisions a fearless, self-sustaining, civically engaged global arts community. It seeks to nurture the next generation of arts leaders and cultural entrepreneurs to build this community.