By Tricia Miller Klapheke
When Santiago Martínez moved from Bogotá, Colombia, to Pittsburgh for graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in 2017, he was expecting to take his master’s degree back home to Colombia.
Instead, his master’s in arts management took him in a different direction — to the theaters of New York City.
Since November 2024, Santiago has worked as director of foundation and government partnerships at Second Stage Theater, one of the four not-for-profit theaters on Broadway. This milestone follows almost five years working off-Broadway. It has been an exciting year for Second Stage. The organization recently welcomed a new artistic director, Evan Cabnet, and a new executive director, Adam Siegel. And Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose,” which is playing at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater, won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Santiago arrived in New York at perhaps the worst possible time for someone looking to make a career in the theaters of Broadway — just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019 he took a job managing institutional giving at the Atlantic Theater Company, an off-Broadway theater company and acting school. The following year, the pandemic forced the city’s theaters to close.
It was a time of tension and innovation, with Santiago always strategizing about re-opening plans as he crafted proposals outlining productions with all the necessary contingencies to avoid canceling shows.
"It was an education on how organizations navigate problems," Santiago says.
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Long before New York was an option, Santiago had his heart set on a career in arts and culture in his home country. After he earned his bachelor's degree in music he started writing music for theater in Bogotá. But as his responsibilities expanded to include finding new revenue streams, writing grants and building budgets, he realized he had more to learn.
He applied for graduate programs in the U.S. and Europe, and a grant he got from Colfuturo, a non-governmental organization in Colombia that partners with CMU’s Heinz College, allowed him to move to Pittsburgh.
He found what he was looking for there.
"Kathy Smith taught us finance," he recalls. "She was old school. There were hand-written exams. We were looking at 990s and audits for both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.” He also recalls fondly that Brett Crawford's class on marketing and David Gurwin's class on law and the arts were intense. Nevertheless, he says he regularly uses the skills and knowledge he picked up from those demanding courses.
During his time at CMU, Santiago had formative internships at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon; Assemble, a nonprofit space for arts and technology in the city’s Garfield neighborhood; and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a nonprofit promoting the arts in Pittsburgh's Cultural District. For each of them he worked in prospect research and grant writing. He still refers to the experience he got researching for the Trust as it prepared for a large project.
"I left them a thing that looked like a spider web," he explains, laughing. "It was like, this is the Trust at the center, these are your trustees, and these are the people who the trustees know. The network was connected to a table that included names and the number of connections, which increased the likelihood of engaging them."
Yet no amount of education or practical experience could have prepared him for what would happen when he started at the Atlantic at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Cancelling a show is a five-figure expense, but when you are closed for nine to 12 months, that's different," he says.
Santiago remembers using every element of knowledge he had learned in graduate school during that time. Typically, theaters plan 12 to 18 months ahead for a season, but starting in 2020, they had to plan show-by-show and slowly work their way back up to programming full seasons over the following years. As he applied for grants, Santiago outlined the prevention protocols and multiple financial scenarios.
He remembers working at Atlantic as the company produced Sanaz Toosi’s “English,” which later won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2022, Santiago became director of institutional giving at the New York Theatre Workshop, a storied off-Broadway theater in the East Village. The workshop was preparing to stage “Merrily We Roll Along,” a popular revival of Stephen Sondheim's musical that featured stars Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.
"I understood very well that each production is part of an environment. And a known production raises your profile," Santiago says. "That show allowed us to cultivate new relationships and have more time with funders and program officers at foundations. It was a fantastic Broadway-bound production, and everyone wanted to see it."
Santiago found that the theater community in New York was close and collaborative, working together through the pandemic and the years of recovery to find the funding they all needed. How close? When a headhunter asked if he would be interested in a job at a different theater, he was able to figure out that Second Stage was the one looking.
"I talk a lot about artistic directors because they curate the season,” he says. “Then I spend a lot of time writing about each production while trying to craft engaging stories that embody the company’s tone and style."
Personally, after all Santiago has learned and experienced in the United States, his proudest accomplishment is working to support not-for-profit theater in New York.
"The thing I feel proud of is that I'm an immigrant who is contributing to theater in the USA," he says. "I never imagined that I would be working in NYC when I moved to Pittsburgh. My original thought was that I would move back and work in Colombia's arts and culture scene, and here I am."