Fringe Festival 2024 launches by announcing its new CEO

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On the opening day of its fall Fringe Festival, FringeArts has announced that Nell Bang-Jensen, the artistic director of Theatre Horizon in Norristown, will be its new leader.

Bang-Jensen (Danish pronunciation: “bong-yensen”) will become the organization’s new CEO, taking over from cofounder Nick Stuccio, who stepped down last year.

She will begin her position as CEO after the current 2024 festival wraps in October, because she has a piece in Fringe: She is directing one of the headlining premiere productions: “Nosejob” by Lightning Rod Special.

During her time with Theatre Horizon, Bang-Jensen positioned it as a community-oriented theater company by developing new work based on the lives and histories of Norristown residents, and using the building to support families with children on the autism spectrum and as an emergency Zoom theater day care during the pandemic.

Bang-Jensen’s new job is to reimagine FringeArts for a theater world fundamentally changed by the pandemic, as many organizations that had fostered new theater have recently folded: the Under the Radar Festival, the writing residence SPACE at Ryder Farm, the Humana Festival and the University of the Arts.

“We’re in a disconcerting moment,” she said. “Art institutions are going to survive and thrive if they figure out how to be in alignment with community-held values. What do the people around us actually want out of this public space? That’s a basic question that I feel like sometimes people don’t stop to ask.”

Bang-Jensen is a longtime participant in the Fringe Festival, having presented several pieces since graduating from Swarthmore College in 2011 with a double major in English and theater.

“Like many theater majors who don’t know what to do next, I thought, ‘Let me make a Fringe show,” Bang-Jensen said. “I stuck around. It’s that kind of possibility and ecosystem that FringeArts has created for Philly artists that has made the Philadelphia arts and culture scene what it is.”

The Philly Fringe is unusual among fringe festivals nationally and internationally, which typically provide a platform for independent theater companies and individual artists to present work. Here, FringeArts also curates and presents its own string of shows, often importing productions that otherwise may not come to Philly to bring them into conversation with local productions.

The FringeArts search committee was not necessarily looking for someone from Philly to lead the Philly Fringe. But it worked out that way.

“Of the 75 applicants, she was one of the few from Philadelphia, and the only one of the semifinalists there was in Philadelphia,” said board chair Mark Dichter. “We were not thinking that you needed to be from Philadelphia to be hired. But she has both presented independent shows in our festival and she’s directing one of the curated shows this year. She has the breadth of experience.”

Bang-Jensen is looking to shift away from the FringeArts building, the $7 million converted pumphouse on the Delaware River Waterfront that opened in 2013. For theater to thrive, she said, it needs to be closer to home.

“Doing things in different neighborhoods that look a little less traditional than an audience sitting down and watching something, but maybe are asked to participate or experience, is a way of opening the doors figuratively and literally to people who wouldn’t necessarily come into this space,” she said.

This year’s Fringe is already experimenting with scattering headline shows around town. Festival staple Pig Iron Theatre is staging its premiere of “Poor Judge” at the Wilma Theater in Center City, and Bang-Jensen’s production of Lighting Rod Special’s “Nosejob” is running at Theatre Exile in South Philadelphia.

With the lingering pandemic slump, FringeArts was forced to scale down its festival last year, with no headlining artists brought in from out of town and many productions had smaller budgets. This year, the festival is presenting closer to its pre-pandemic level, and Dichter said Bang-Jensen is coming into a reasonably stable organization.

“It’s in a sustainable state, but we really want to grow the organization, grow it back to where it was,” he said. “That’s done by making the case to funders. The performing arts depends on funders. It’s not like Broadway, which depends on investors who are willing to lose money. There’s a long timeline to that.

“That’s what will enable us to grow and do things like bring theater throughout the city, which I think will broaden the basis for people supporting FringeArts,” he said. “It’s not just a Center City program.”