Join artist manager and producer Juan Souki, creative producer Jecca Barry, along with Palestinian artist and 421 manager, Mays Albaik as they discuss the intricacies of creating a support structure for artists in their communities and professional practice, and delve deeper into the day to day work of an arts manager.

About the Panelists

Juan Souki


Arts manager and live experience designer. Juan stands for projects that are artistically powerful, socially conscious and meaningful to the communities where they belong. Founder and Director for eight years at Imaginarios, he has developed many projects locally and internationally, growing a community of creatives from different backgrounds and shaping performing arts projects with Latin American identity.



Juan holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York and a latent desire for artistic collaboration, he has worked along with artists and institutions all over, including the Prague Quadrennial in the Czech Republic, Teatro Nacional in Colombia, Teatro La Plaza in Peru, Performance Space 122 in NYC and many others. He has been creative director for outreach and live interaction projects by companies like Diageo, Mondelez, General Mills, Empresas Polar, FCB and KBSP. His dream is growing ODELIA into a platform for shaping beautiful Latin American performing arts projects with a notion of mobility, bringing strategic thinking to local works while making them accessible to new markets and of true positive impact to their communities and the world.

Jecca Barry
 

Jecca Barry is an opera, theater, film, and music producer, as well as a nonprofit arts leader. From 2012-2022, she served as Executive Director of the acclaimed production company Beth Morrison Projects(BMP), and was a Co-Director of New York’s annual PROTOTYPE Festival from 2017-2022. Jecca has overseen the commissioning, development, production and touring of over 30 new theater, music-theater, and opera works, and has toured those works to over 40 national and 15 international venues. Works Jecca has produced have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Music, a Total Theatre Award and Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Bessie, Helen Hayes, Theatre Bay Area, and Elliot Norton Awards in cities around the US. The PROTOTYPE Festival was nominated for Outstanding Festival at the 2019 International Opera Awards. Jecca holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in avant-garde flute performance from the Royal Northern College of Music and New York University.

Mays Albaik

Mays Albaik is a Palestinian artist and the Programs & Community Initiatives Manager at 421, a creative platform in Abu Dhabi. In her practice she explores the triangulation of place, body, and language through video, sculpture, and installation, and is expanding into collaborative methods of art production. At 421, she focuses on researching, setting, and executing the broader vision for programs that prioritize the needs of the creative community, working towards a horizontal approach to institutional operation. Mays holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BArch from the American University of Sharjah, and is an alumna of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship. Mays lives and works in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.