Artist Workshops
FringeArts staff host an annual series of in person and online workshops to help artists prepare for their Fringe Festival Productions. Online workshops are recorded for reference and can be accessed below.
You can find our Spring workshops below. Stay tuned for our Summer 2025 workshops, including collaborations with Philadelphia Scenic Works!
For detailed guides on self-producing your work in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, check out the Artist Resource Center.
If you have any questions or concerns about topics not covered in these workshops, contact the Fringe Festival Manager, Simon Rabinowitz, at Simon@FringeArts.com
How to Eventotron
April 14th, 6 – 7 PM
Online
Join Independent Artist Program Manager Simon Rabinowitz as he walks through the Fringe Festival Registration process via Eventotron, and answers any questions about festival participation.
Fringe 101: Budgeting, Marketing, and Front of House
April 22nd, 6 – 8 PM
Online
Hosted by the FringeArts staff, this workshop provides producers with a toolkit for producing their shows while answering some of the most commonly asked questions. The workshop will begin with Managing Director Melissa Bridge teaching basic budgeting terms and strategies, and walking through the creation and populating of a budget. Director of Marketing Melissa Negro will review marketing services offered to festival participants and provide tips and guidance on how artists can structure their own marketing plans. Finally, our Director of Venue and Patron Services, Devi Bass, will review best practices for managing your front of house experience at your show and review festival ticket policies and procedures.
Artists U: Building New Audiences
May 5th, 6 – 8 PM
FringeArts Studio
In this interactive workshop, we will look at how we find and build connections with our audiences. Andrew Simonet will share practical tools for starting where you are and keeping the art in the center as we promote and build conversations around our work.
Artists U: Sustaining in a Time of Change
May 18th, 10 AM – 4 PM
FringeArts Studio
Based on twenty years of work with artists locally and nationally, artist leader Andrew Simonet will build conversations and offer tools for making a balanced, sustainable artist life. This workshop is an opportunity to build clarity around your artistic practice and the resources that sustain it. It is community organizing, creating positive and rigorous conversations across artistic disciplines, ages, and cultures. And it is specific and practical: the principles, tools, and prompts artists use to make sustainable lives and to make the art and impact that matters most to them.
We will talk about:
- The role of artists, our impact and value
- Planning, i.e. setting long-term intentions, the most powerful tool for sustaining as an artist
- Time design: identifying and prioritizing the time your art practice needs, doing fewer things better, and tackling all that administrative work.
- Financial thinking for artists: Knowing your time cost (hour, day, and week), understanding revenue streams, negotiating, debt, home buying, and how artists can reach beyond solvency to security
- Your mission: What audiences, communities, and impacts matter most in your work? We will work individually and with a partner to generate language around your practice and mission, not just what you create but why it matters to you and why it matters to your communities
Stay Tuned!
Summer 2025
We will be announcing more workshops for this summer, including collaborations with Philadelphia Scenic Works on a variety of technical areas!
If you unable to attend this year’s workshops, below you will find recordings of our workshop series from 2023.
