JOANNA OBUZOR | PHOTO BY MARTHA RIAL

Stage management is a tricky job. The stage manager of a Broadway show or marquee concert needs to make sure everything happens — from performers making their entrances to lights coming on. In fact, the stage manager probably had to make sure the lights got to the venue in the first place. It’s a thankless and often exhausting job.

Joanna Obuzor does it for an entire neighborhood.

Obuzor rose from stage management to venue management to her current role as the vice president of venue operations for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. She’s now tasked with keeping the bevy of indoor venues and outdoor spaces that make up the Cultural District humming — and keeping audiences happy.

“It’s a job that keeps me from annoying my family,” she jokes. “There’s a lot of balls to keep in the air, and that’s one of the things I love about it. No two days are ever the same.”

At a time when the Trust has large-scale projects in the works, including Arts Landing — a sprawling redevelopment of several blocks along Fort Duquesne Boulevard — there are more balls in the air than usual. For Obuzor, though, that responsibility is a natural outgrowth of her career to date.

The stages just keep getting bigger.

Like many arts professionals, Obuzor spent her teenage years onstage before pivoting during college. Unlike many, however, she didn’t simply drift away from performance; the choice was made for her.

“I was a dancer through age 17,” she explains. “And when I do something, I do it right — so I did a really good job getting injured.” A career in dance was out; her mother encouraged her to start taking classes at the Community College of Allegheny County until she figured out what she wanted to do next.

“I found the theater department … they said, ‘You’re going to stage manage the dance show.’ I had no idea what that meant.

“I did that and found out that I loved it.”

She stage managed at City Theatre Co. and at summer-stock theaters in New England. In 2015, she became a production manager with the Trust; less than two years later, she became the operations manager for the Benedum Center.

Obuzor was put in charge of venue operations for the full Cultural District in September 2023. “Operations is stage managing — you’re just not stage managing a production, you’re stage managing a larger organization. It’s the same job.”

When Arts Landing opens — it’ll be ready for next year’s NFL Draft, though the formal opening will come with the 2026 Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival — it’ll turn 4 acres of former parking garages and aging buildings into a multi-use arts and recreation space. A massive “great lawn” will face a bandshell, with the Andy Warhol Bridge as a backdrop.

Obuzor is quick to credit other folks within the Trust, including president and CEO Kendra Whitlock Ingram, with the vision for Arts Landing. For her, the development involves innumerable vital details.

“The idea of turning Arts Landing into Arts Landing, that is 0% me. The idea of making sure we have the correct irrigation system to correctly water the plants to make sure we keep it a flourishing park — heavily me.”

A much more visible example of Obuzor’s fingerprints will come in the form of Three Stories, the former home of theater company Bricolage on Liberty Avenue. The space has been rebuilt as a modular performance and rehearsal space — the name comes from the fact that there are different potential venues on each of the building’s above-ground floors.

The Trust is offering short-term rentals of Three Stories to local nonprofits and individual artists — essentially free.

“One of the missions of the Trust is to activate Downtown … We don’t make theater; we bring theater in. So whether it’s cultivated locally or whether it comes in from a truck across the country, we’re bringing art and people into our spaces.”

With all these stages to manage, the schedule is far from a 9-to-5. (“There was one security guard who started congratulating me if I would leave when it was still light out,” she says.)

“She’s got an incredible amount of stuff on her plate. She balances it really expertly. She awards a fair amount of autonomy and ownership,” says Zoe Ruth, the Trust’s director of operations for Liberty Avenue venues. “She’s always there to answer a question or to give advice or just to think and work through things.”

When asked about the most impactful moments in her time with the Trust, she cites an obvious answer: the flurry of activity around the first appearance of “Hamilton” in Pittsburgh, including hosting 3,000 students from Title I schools for an exclusive matinee.

But she’s just as quick to name a less-visible achievement.

“Several years ago, we put an adult changing table in one of the restrooms in the Benedum Center,” she says “The parent of a [teenager said that they] weren’t able to come to the theater; it was too long … to not use the restroom. After we put that in, the mother thanked a member of my team and started crying. That was really meaningful.”