More About Julie Nemitz

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With over fifteen years of experience in executive sales and marketing leadership roles, Julie has a proven track record of driving growth through strategic vision and innovative content marketing. She has partnered with Fortune 500 companies and led teams at award-winning agencies and publishers in New York City. Known for rolling up her sleeves and solving challenges, often by finding the perfect creative messaging that drives consumers to action, she combines big-picture strategy with hands-on execution to deliver robust marketing solutions for her clients. 

In June of 2019, Julie launched the Theatre Marketing Lab. To date, over 2,600 theatres have benefitted from the Lab's training content and group coaching with Julie. We're pretty proud of that. Her signature programs Sell The Show! and Merrily We Roll Out: The Season Reveal Launch Plan have both impacted local theatre marketing strategies from Glasgow, Ireland to Melbourne, Australia and everywhere in between.

Julie’s passion project, The Artist Marketing Lab, launched in late 2022. There, Julie works directly with theatre artists to develop personal brands and companies. She has worked with playwright and Guggenheim fellow Christine Masciotti, Broadway director James Rocco to launch Thirty Saints Productions, award-winning screenwriter and playwright Marc Ketchem, and playwright Susan Parker and Concord Theatricals to rebrand her company Parker Plays for the digital age. 

These are just a few of the projects out of the Artist Marketing Lab in the past year!  Julie's deep desire to empower artists with a better understanding of the power in their unique branding and marketing abilities speaks directly to Julie’s passion for keeping new theatre works alive and produced in communities everywhere. 

Julie has also worked with numerous for-profit arts companies to guide them in making a huge impact on their businesses by creating influential marketing content born from innovative strategies. She is entering her third year as Adjunct Faculty at Western Michigan University Department of Theatre and Dance, teaching arts marketing to the next generation of performing artists and arts leaders.

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Julie's parents met doing summer stock in Southwest Michigan. They built a life centered on their great love for the theatre and instilled that in their children as well. They owned Sister Lakes Playhouse for much of the 1970s and Julie's father, Art Nemitz, is a renowned director, actor and playwright who dedicated over forty years to teaching high school English and Theatre. He co-directed The Kalamazoo Civic Theatre's Summer Theatre training program for decades. The Civic program saw Broadway legends like Marin Mazzie, Jerry Mitchell, Jimmy Ryan, and Jerry Dixon on its stages. 

Julie spent countless hours at her father's side, watching theatre being made as well as participating in it. In fact, by the time Julie was 25, she had performed in over forty musicals.  She chose to study music in college and focused her studies on vocal jazz, as a member of the world-renowned vocal jazz ensemble Gold Company where she shared the stage with jazz greats such as The Manhattan Transfer, The New York Voices, Rosemary Clooney, Bobby McFerrin, among many others. 

After a year on the road with the National Tour of The Pirates of Penzance, Julie moved to Chicago where a job temping introduced her to the world of marketing and she quickly became enamored with that world too. Several years later, a job with Grey Advertising brought her to NYC. A summer at The O'Neill Cabaret Symposium in Connecticut kicked off a successful club career in Manhattan at legendary clubs Eighty Eights, Don't Tell Mama and The Laurie Beechman, highlighted by collaborations with artist and producer Scott Coulter and the songwriting team of Zina Goldrich and Marcy Heisler.

Then a whole lot of life happened. Marriage. Two delicious daughters. Two cats. A Bernedoodle.

"After 15 years living on the East Coast working for the biggest brands, media companies, and marketing agencies, I realized during a less-than-modest meltdown in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, after my umpteenth trip that quarter, what mattered most wasn't my never-ending climb up the for-profit corporate ladder."

Julie now resides back in her hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan (halfway between Chicago and Detroit) with her husband Rich, two scrumptious-if-dramatic teenage daughters Lucy Jane and Eliza Jo, that Bernedoodle Rory Pond (any Dr. Who fans out there?), and sister cats Cece and Jojo. 

"I finally realized, sitting on that floor of the Delta gate in O'Hare airport, that I needed to do something with meaning, that allowed me to be home with my family. If I took all the skills I'd learned in for-profit marketing and used them for good, my future looked purposeful and much, much happier.

That something was a return to where it all began-- the theatre."