The O’Shaughnessy Cohort Program is closed and no longer receiving applications at this time. Please keep watching this web page and/or join our email list to receive an alert when we open applications for the program again in the future. Thank you!
Seeking Applications for 2023-2024 New Pilot Program: The O’Shaughnessy Cohort
The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University has more than a 50-year legacy of support and partnership with local and regional professional arts organizations. Leaning into this legacy, we are seeking applications for a NEW O’Shaughnessy Cohort, set to launch in June, 2023 for the 2023-2024 season. We seek producing arts organizations to partner with us in the year ahead in order to build brand identity and audience across all organizations in the cohort and to further enhance artistic experiences and opportunities for the general public as well as St. Catherine University students, faculty, and staff.
WHAT WE OFFER: O’Shaughnessy Cohort Benefits
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State-of-the-Art Space: The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University’s primary performance space is our 1,800-seat proscenium stage theater. This space can be easily adapted to a 600-seat space by lowering the ceiling of the venue. In addition, our Frey Theater is a flexible black box theater that seats 200 and a recital hall (permanent stage with fixed seating) that seats 180.
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Financial Support: The cohort will hold extremely high priority in our programming decisions. We will negotiate cohort contracts individually, with the aim to be as supportive as possible to cohort members. We expect rental rates to be half that of commercial rates and hope to request not more than 25% of gross ticket sales for cohort events.
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Administrative, Production, and Sales and Marketing Support: We are an IATSE union house and our production staff are extremely knowledgeable. Our administrative team, led by Irene Green, have vast experience in arts administration. We offer excellent and consistent patron services, ticketing, front of house, and sales and marketing support to all organizations we host.
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A diverse and robust campus community: With over 3,500 students and more than 650 faculty and staff, we have a built-in campus community that is rich for audience development and engaging collaborations.
WHAT WE SEEK: Application Criteria for Arts Organizations
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Right- sized for our spaces: Performances should draw 300+ patrons in order to fit in our largest venue, and 100+ for the Frey Theater or Recital Hall. Productions will need to be aligned with the scope and resources of our spaces.
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Alignment with the Mission, Vision and Values of St. Catherine University: We educate women to lead and influence, and seek to be globally respected for educating women who transform the world. Our values include academic excellence, community, integrity, social justice, and reflection. Our core value of social justice calls us to center and amplify artistic voices that are marginalized. Does your art connect to these themes? If so, we want to hear from you!
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Desire for Mutually Beneficial Collaboration and Deep Partnership: We want to be your exclusive home for public performances, and we want to support you with the calendar dates you need to make that happen. We want artistic excellence on our stages and can offer excellent production, administrative, and sales and marketing support to aid this effort. Although this is a pilot program, we have an eye toward the future and seek partners who have the desire and capacity to build a partnership that can be transformative for all involved in the years to come. We are interested in building a cohort of organizations that can support each other and grow in partnership with each other as well as with the O’Shaughnessy for the benefit of all. We see the first year of engagement as a pilot year of discovery, where we will learn alongside our cohort members how best to be engaged together for maximum benefit of all parties.
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Opportunities for our Students: The O’Shaughnessy is part of St. Catherine University, and as such, we seek arts organizations that can offer classes, engage students in performance opportunities, and are willing to partner in and out of the classroom to add value to the lives of our students. Nearly half of our undergraduate student body identifies as BIPOC, and we seek to build a cohort that reflects the diversity of our campus.
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Artistic Excellence: Our ability to develop and engage audience members is directly tied to the experiences they have with the cohort. We seek art that is high in quality and exciting to our community. We also hope to build breadth and depth of artistic offerings within the cohort.
