Maria Carneiro is a Lisbon-based theater-maker with a decade of experience in organizations of varying sizes. She serves as Co-artistic Director for teatromosca.
She is a firm believer in the power of the arts and creativity and has, from an early age, studied, volunteered, and worked abroad. She describes herself as forever curious about other cultures and people, experiencing new situations, meeting people, and developing new skills. Maria completed the MMIAM program in 2019.
Are you an artist? How did you become interested in arts management?
I’m not an artist but I have enjoyed the arts since I was a child. My parents, let’s say, checked all the boxes. They took me to museums and the theater and we frequently went to the movies and concerts. Also, my dad was in business and as a result, we went to a lot of dinner parties, often attended by very wealthy people. At these parties, people were always talking about traveling, the museums they visited, and the art they saw; those conversations fascinated me. It was always an experience to go to someone’s home and see the art that I would later see in books.
As a teenager—I’d always loved to read—I began reading plays and really dove into the world of theater. Very early on I learned that there was so much I could do in theater, I didn’t have to be on stage. I started experimenting with directing and dramaturgy in high school and later studied Theater Studies in college. Shortly after finishing school, I began working as a theater producer, without really knowing what I was doing or whether I would truly want to pursue that as a career. Shortly, I began to gain more responsibilities, and at some point, I realized that I would like to go back to school for proper management training. I wanted to stop and take time to think about everything that I’d experienced up to this point—I’ve just very quickly summed up roughly five years of my life—and that’s how I found the MMIAM! What distinguished it from the other graduate programs I was researching was the travel component. I was nervous about the management part but I told myself, “For the travel, I think I can make some extra effort!”
So, how did that work out for you?
By traveling I mean not only the travel itself but also getting to meet other arts managers and artists, learn about other cultures and points of view, and reflect in real time. For example, we spent a lot of time in North America, where there is a very specific management style. In a few short words, performing arts companies want loyal customers and high retention rates. But then we went to India and China. In Beijing, we had a meeting with a ballet company and someone asked our host if it was important for the ballet to have a high rate of return for customers and the manager said ‘No. I don’t care about that. I care about how fast I sell my tickets.’ She went on to explain that Beijing has millions of people, so someone will come, but her metrics were all about how quickly the tickets sold. This is a good example of how the MMIAM showcased the importance of context. These experiences were very valuable lessons.
After the presentation of an open rehearsal. Credit: Pedro Silva, teatromosca.
So tell me about what you do now.
I work in a medium-sized, independent theater company. We will celebrate our 25th anniversary this year, but in particular, the last decade has been one of significant growth. Since 2018, we have managed a venue owned by the municipality of Sintra, a city just outside of Lisbon. We’ve begun organizing a performing arts festival, MUSCARIUM, which is more like an artist residency program. The artists come and work for a week and can work on whatever they want. We only ask that they hold one public rehearsal for people to come in and get to know them and their work. We also do more community engagement programming now, having a venue helped open up these opportunities. We run theater camps for kids and teenagers, we tutor a group of actors with disabilities, and another for people over the age of 60. Finally, we have a small publishing house. As you can probably imagine, all of these things have increased our number of full-time staff and changed our work dynamic quite a bit.
I feel like I’m always on a challenging, exciting, scary, amazing, life-threatening, invigorating rollercoaster. Despite our team growing, it’s still small and I wear many hats. My core role is to plan for the future; strategic planning. I am always thinking about what our activities could be—how all of the different branches of the company are linked and how we need to ensure that they’re all working together. For example, the plays we produce with the outreach or community engagement team should be published through our publishing company and then presented at local schools. To continue, I’m also thinking about how our creative efforts will need to continue to be supported. In the next five years, where is our funding going to come from? Who will our partners be? What will the political situation be like—this last question, of course, is very hard to guess. I also do a lot of near-future project management. For example, we’re finalizing our program for 2026. So, I will do negotiations for those productions and I’ll figure out, for example, where people will be rehearsing when the time comes.
I live in two time periods at once, both in the future.
Is there something you’ve worked on professionally in the past year that you’re really proud of?
Last year, we produced a show that took a long time to prepare. It was very demanding. In terms of the text, it was originally written in German by Elfriede Jelinek, a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author. Her work is very controversial. She wrote a powerful text called Charges, about refugees and people being deprived of their humanity by various forces operating in the world. We knew about the work; it was making the rounds in German-speaking countries and we were lucky to have a German translator, a dear former Professor, as a contact. She agreed to both translate the work and help us with the dramaturgy, or unpacking the layers within the text.
This project took roughly four years to produce. We needed more actors than normal, it was a three-hour show—in Europe, this is very uncommon these days—it took a long time to rehearse, we had to think a lot about the reception of the work since it is not the most politically correct piece. At the same time, there were many complicated operational factors, but the company invested in this project and it debuted last November. I feel proud of our work. It was a big risk.
What was the public’s response?
Surprisingly positive! We thought we were going to lose a lot of audience members during the performances but in all the shows we did, we only lost one person. We’ve been emboldened! And because we have been so captivated by Jelinek’s writing and thought, we’re planning to do three more shows based on her work. Over the past few years, our overall concept for all of our activities has been based on the idea that current society is very fearful and that fear is turning people against one another. In 2027, we’ll shift our focus and begin to work on the concept of self-care and caring for others. We’re thinking about healing and taking care of people after the pandemic and during difficult situations such as the wars, and all the harm we are feeling.
That production also allowed us to see the success that can come from giving ourselves more rehearsal time and we want to integrate this into our practice more frequently. This is especially important because we want to include the teenagers and elderly from the community engagement programs in more of our professional shows.
Is there something coming up that you’re looking forward to?
The most amazing thing that the MMIAM brought me was my cohort. We became very good friends and we’re still very close. When we were in India, we met the director of the Rajasthan International Folk (RIFF) Festival, Divya Bhatia. During our visit, the director told us that a lot of local music and dance practices were in danger of being lost as younger generations were moving to larger cities for better opportunities and as a result were not having the chance to learn from their ancestors. Thus, the festival’s mission is to present local musicians and dancers and to positively impact their lives by ensuring that the artists can make a living by making art. Moreover, the festival pairs locals with Western musicians to create records; profits from record sales go into the pockets of local musicians. This unique business model, and the drive to tackle a real problem and safeguard art forms, really fascinated me. During this class, I was sitting next to Ann-Christine [Racette] and we were both amazed by the director’s work and the festival’s mission. She and I have been dreaming about going to this festival since 2019 and we’re finally going to make it happen this October! We’ve been planning this trip for about two years! In India, we will also get to see our friend Ankit, and hopefully other colleagues, which makes us super happy.