By Tom O’Connor

Since our founding, TOC Arts Partners has worked alongside more than 150 arts and culture organizations on the questions that matter most to their futures: how to lead, how to organize, and how to sustain the work they exist to do. We have always believed that those questions are inseparable, whether working with theatres, orchestras, dance companies, performing arts centers, museums, film organizations, universities, service organizations, and more.

We have accompanied our clients through one of the most transformative periods in history for our field, and have remained committed to continuously expanding what we can offer as their needs have evolved and our own understanding and practice have deepened. That commitment is what brings us to today's news.

We are proud to welcome Eric Gershman as our new Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, expanding our robust organizational strategy practice to include financial sustainability planning, business and revenue modeling, comprehensive organizational assessment, and more.

Eric brings extraordinary depth to this work. His career spans arts and culture, higher education, and media — with interim executive positions at Newport Classical, Long Wharf Theatre, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival, consulting engagements at McCarter Theatre Center, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, the Brown Arts Institute, Netflix, and Paramount, and internal strategy positions at Disney Theatrical Group and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. As a team member of AEA Consulting he helped to lead feasibility studies and operating plans for The National Black Theatre, The Rhode Island School of Design, the Museum of Modern Art, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, ProPublica and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Brown University and was previously on faculty at the University of Rhode Island, Winthrop University, and Columbia University, the latter of which named an annual teaching adjunct award in his honor.

What Eric shares with the entire TOC Arts Partners team is a genuine orientation toward the organizations he serves — a belief that the work of strategy is ultimately the work of helping people and institutions find their footing and move forward with confidence.

For the organizations in our community: if you have been navigating questions about financial sustainability, structural resilience, or what your organization needs to look like on the other side of this moment in our sector, we are ready to go there with you. We are glad to have Eric joining us in that effort.

You can read our full press release here.

TOC Arts Partners (formerly Tom O’Connor Consulting Group) is a national strategy and executive search firm for arts and culture organizations. Our team of seasoned arts leaders brings decades of first-hand experience in organizational strategy, capital project transitions, and operational excellence for arts institutions.