Navigating a Career in Performance: Your Creative Career Guidebook

Navigating a Career in Performance: Your Creative Career Guidebook provides practical tools, strategies, and motivational advice for aspiring actors and performers across a variety of industries, including TV/film, theater, and themed entertainment.

This book is designed to accompany performers through every step in their career journey, from landing their first job after school through mid-career pivots and switching industries. It outlines the concrete steps that actors can take to make decisions about their education and training, understand how and where to audition, manage their money, create marketing materials, and even explore finding an agent and joining a union. Filled with motivational advice from mentors in the industry and creative worksheet exercises for personalized career planning, self-reflection, and goal setting, Navigating a Career in Performance demystifies a complex industry, sharing crucial career-related information. It explores a wide range of topics, including the types of jobs available in live entertainment and TV/film, education options, job searching, networking, career marketing materials, auditions and interviews, unions, financial empowerment, and career shifts.

This book is written for performers and actors in entertainment, at all stages of their career, working in television, film, commercials, theater, voice-overs, themed entertainment, education, and more. Covering a wide variety of entertainment industries, this book can also be a companion for higher education or postsecondary educators and students exploring career and workforce readiness.

Navigating a Career in Performance includes access to downloadable versions of the worksheets featured in the book, available at www.routledge.com/9781032607399.

Jessica Champagne Hansen is Costume Faculty at East Los Angeles College in the Theater Arts Department, a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829, and a professional costume designer based in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of Navigating a Career in Technical Entertainment: Your Creative Career Guidebook (Routledge 2023).

Camille Schenkkan is the COO of the Ebell of Los Angeles, a historic cultural and civic performing arts venue focused on women’s creativity and scholarship. She is an Adjunct Faculty member at Cal State LA and has previously worked with organizations such as Center Theatre Group, Arts for LA and Circle X Theatre Co. She is the co-author of Navigating a Career in Technical Entertainment: Your Creative Career Guidebook (Routledge 2023).

Vanessa Mizzone Pellegrini is Performance Faculty at East Los Angeles College in the Theater Arts Department and a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Association. She is a professional actress based in LA with numerous credits on stage, film, and television. Vanessa holds a BA in Theater and Communications from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Acting from the University of California, Los Angeles.