MA Top 30 Professional: Imelda Tecson Juarez

Manager of Group Sales and Grassroots Marketing
Strathmore Hall Foundation

As a violist, Imelda Tecson Juarez, 39, played in all sorts of professional settings over the course of her performance career: the Dallas Opera Orchestra, the Fort Worth Symphony, even for the ESPN NFL Draft and a national tour of Hamilton. But one observation nagged at her through all those experiences.

“I loved performing [classical music], but there was a disconnect between how much I loved it and how many people showed up. That was really hard to see when I was in the opera and the orchestra: When you go to Hamilton, 5,000 seats are sold out every night for six weeks,” Tecson says. “One thing that brought me to arts admin  was trying to bridge that.”

Tecson only recently made the pivot to arts administration, but she’s already had an outsized impact, with the Sphinx organization inviting her to join its latest LEAD cohort. She got her start as an audience development assistant at Wolf Trap before coming to Strathmore last fall, where she manages the venue’s group sales and
grassroots marketing strategy. Part of her job is being an ambassador for Strathmore in the Washington, DC, metro area.

“I talk to all the embassies, all the schools, all the senior living centers—people who don’t necessarily know they want to go to certain programs. It’s my job to make sure that as many diverse audiences as possible are made aware of what we do,” Tecson says.

The diversity aspect is personal, too. Despite Texas being more than 40 percent Hispanic, Tecson, like some of her colleagues, says she was “usually the only person of color in any professional organization or youth organization” she joined from her childhood through college at the University of North Texas. She expected things to change when she decamped for the East Coast. They didn’t.

“That [also] brought me to arts admin,” Tecson says. “We need to diversify our audiences, but we also need to diversify organizations.”