Category: Process Journal

Before I took on my new job responsibilities for my internship, I am the Production Assistant for my Exec. Artistic Director Jamel Gaines. We had an amazing opportunity to go to Accra and Cape Coast in Ghana for a performance! We left after our annual Black History Performance at BAM Fisher. We stayed there for 9 days, experiencing Ghana’s culture and then doing a cultural exchange between our dance theater and their national dance theater, as well as the local universities.

Making sure everything was running smooth with music and the visuals for the production was my responsibility, since the production was multimedia I was to make sure all of the pieces of media were cohesive and changed on cue. All of this had to be done manually, so I was on the projector and changing it like a slideshow while the Mr. Gaines was on the audio but we couldn’t see each other during the show but I have seen his piece about 50+ times in the last 5 years so it wasn’t too complicated to doing timing with each other.

The company I am working for is a dance theater company based in Downtown Brooklyn, Jamel Gaines Creative Outlet. It’s a fairly small not-for-profit company with under about 25 employees, that is a mix of teaching artists, administrative staff and artists apart of the company. I am currently being assigned to the marketing/graphic side of the company to help with Social Media posts and targeting a new audience.

The company has a Dance Theater which consists of company members doing Mr. Gaines signature choreography, a Young Artists program that kids that are in high school/college that show great artistry train with Mr. Gaines and other staff to prepare them for joining the company, a dance school called the Cultural Arts Program that trains kids as young as 3 years old, teaching them African, Modern, Ballet, Contemporary, Hip-Hop, and etc. They also have an Arts In Education program which consists of multiple teaching artists going into schools to teach school kids dance, drumming, mask making, art and other activities to give them something else other than regular school work during the school year!

The company was founded in 1994, Mr. Gaines has achieved high honors which include, but are not limited to winning the Palm Spring Dance Festival and showcased at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. 

My first week of job hunting, I was contemplating if I wanted to stay at my current job but I was still looking around for internships at other places. I wasn’t too sure about working in a new environment after working for the same person for about 5 years now. However, I wanted to see what opportunities were out there in the type of work I wanted to do. I was really interested in editorial design and wanted to see if I could land an internship based on that. It’s been awhile since I have searched for a job, but I looked at places I was familiar with that did do internships for college students. I searched on the COMD Internship Coordination Site as well and was even expressinging my struggles with my boss to see if he possibly knows anyone looking for an intern. While doing this I was also working Monday-Friday and sometimes Saturday and taking another class for my portfolio.