During the COVID years, I was trying to figure out how to make things in my backyard. Then I fell into MAKE Santa Fe. It was a community workshop with real shops, real equipment, classes, and people building things. That’s when it clicked for me. I wanted to make stuff because I wanted to do it with other people.
That shouldn’t have surprised me. I studied theater and worked in it for years, mostly on the East Coast. When I moved to Santa Fe, I found out I couldn’t make a living doing theater. That’s a common story around here. But the habits stuck. I later served as MAKE’s executive director and sat on the board at Santa Fe Playhouse. When I introduced myself on an ArtBridge panel about community and collaboration in Santa Fe’s arts scene on July 16, 2025, I said, “What I’m trying to bring into the other fabrication disciplines is that theatrical sense of collaboration.”
That panel got me thinking about what that phrase really means, and how far it can go.
What theater gets right
A theater production pulls many different people toward one shared goal. Performers, directors, designers, carpenters, painters, electricians, and stage managers all bring different expertise. None of them can make the show alone. The lighting depends on the set. The set depends on the blocking. Just by being in the room, everyone picks up a little of everyone else’s craft.
A community workshop works a little differently. At MAKE, members usually weren’t building one shared project. One person might be in the woodshop, another tuning a laser cutter file, another at the forge. But the room still did what a theater does. People showed up with different skills and experience levels. You’d see what someone else was working on, and it would spark a question or an idea. A woodworker might learn something from a metalworker. Someone from ceramics might wander over to the 3D printers. The projects were separate, but the learning was shared. That’s the part I wanted to protect.
Failing forward
The panel happened in a time of a lot of uncertainty. Arts funding was drying up, and the political climate was hard on the kind of work everyone on that stage does. When we were asked what keeps us up at night, it filled me with resolve.
At its core, MAKE gave people three things. It gave them the skills to be self-sufficient, a community to learn from, and resilience through “failing forward.” Making teaches you how to fail. You try something, and it doesn’t work. The joint is loose, the print warps, the glaze runs. You figure out why, you adjust, and you try again. That cycle builds real confidence. It’s also a lot easier to stay in it when someone who’s been there can look at your mistake and tell you what went wrong.
Self-sufficiency doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. It means knowing you have the power to do the work, and knowing you have people who will back you up. Making won’t fix a funding crisis. But when things got hard, we kept doing the work we knew was useful.
Our organizations need the same practice
This is where I think Santa Fe’s arts community has work to do. Every small arts organization carries the same load. Each needs an executive director, an accountant, someone writing grants, operating staff, and a building with utilities. Multiply that across dozens of organizations and a lot of money and energy goes into overhead instead of into the work.
On the panel, I said, knowing it might make me some enemies, that I think the biggest barrier to collaboration in Santa Fe is founder syndrome. By that I mean the habit of starting a new organization instead of joining an existing one, and then guarding its identity so closely that partnership feels like a threat. I see a lot of overlap between organizations here. They have similar missions, audiences, and funders.
When we all go it alone, we spread the funding and the help too thin. Small organizations do good work, but much of it is too small to tackle bigger problems. If we set our egos aside, even when the other organization is a little different, we’d be in a stronger position. That means real partnerships: shared staff, shared space, shared back office. Sometimes it means merging.
None of that is free. Sharing resources takes coordination and trust, and the savings aren’t guaranteed. But the payoff can be more time and money for what each organization exists to do.
Give the idea a physical home
The best example of this I know is the Midtown Arts and Design Alliance, or MADA. It’s a coalition of local arts organizations working together to bring empty buildings on the Midtown campus back into use as a shared visual arts complex. MAKE is one of the partners.
At the panel, I described the plan in phases. First, MAKE would open a kids’ makerspace there, and possibly darkrooms and printmaking studios. Those are disciplines MAKE couldn’t offer before. Later, the main workshop would move to Midtown into a much larger facility, so it could teach more classes and reach more people. The need is real. Classes at MAKE are small by design, and more people want in than it can serve. Phase one is now in the fundraising stage, with construction aiming to start in spring 2027.
What excites me most is being close together. Put that many organizations on one campus, and they bump into each other all the time. Over time, shared space could also mean shared operating costs.
Santa Fe Playhouse was thinking the same way. It launched a summer festival series to give smaller theater companies space and resources, down to a lighting grid, so they could produce their own work. That trains more actors, directors, and designers, and it lifts the whole community.
Sometimes the need is even simpler. Someone building a sculpture over several weeks needs somewhere to leave it between sessions. Many artists in Santa Fe don’t have that. Sometimes opportunity comes down to having a corner, or “a place to let the glue dry.”
What will you bring?
I didn’t set out to bring theater into a workshop. I just knew what I was missing. Making things is better with other people around, and I think the same is true for organizations.
So here’s my ask. Pick one skill you have and offer it to shared work. You don’t need to fix the whole arts economy. You just need to show up with something to contribute. It could be a skill, a resource, a space, or a willingness to solve a problem together.
That’s a theatrical sense of collaboration. Everyone brings their piece, and the work gets made.