Founder, CEO, Oboist
Current City: San Francisco
Current Job and Entrepreneurial Focus: CEO of Red Curtain Addict
Notable Prior Jobs: Director of Accounts at AspireIQ (overseeing influencer marketing/brand marketing strategies for brands such as L'Oreal, BET, Pinterest, LifetimeTV, Samsung, History Channel, etc.), Social Media Manager for Pottery Barn Brands, Production Manager for SF MusicTech Summit, Lincks Productions (social media and activation consultant work for San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Chamber Music San Francisco, the Exploratorium, along with many independent artists), SF Opera's BRAVO! Club Vice President, and was the Marketing Coordinator for Celebrity Attractions and the Tulsa Symphony right out of college.
When I Started Performing: Piano, age 4 & Oboe, age 12.
Performing Arts Background: I played oboe from age 12 and went to college for Oboe performance. During my active years, I played in the Oklahoma All-State Orchestra, Quartz Mountain, Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, Bartlesville Symphony, Signature Symphony, Rainbow Symphony, Symphony Parnassus, OKMEA guest performance, Peninsula Symphony Orchestra, among many more! I also taught piano lessons and oboe lessons, sang in many choirs, and performed as a jazz soloist at Tulsa jazz clubs. Another fun experience was band - I marched throughout high school and college and was the drum major my senior year at TU.
How did your performing arts background supercharge your entrepreneurship? Notes are just notes until you put feeling into them which can come from expressions of dynamics, phrasing, tempos, etc. And a concert is not a concert without an audience. To me, music has always been about the excitement of bringing a community together from all walks of life and it enabled me to be a storyteller. In my professional career, I’ve been able to take these two passions and unique components of music and put them into practice in other ways. For instance, a product is just a product until it is paired with a resonating story and meaning and a brand will never grow unless you cultivate and foster its community of users. Because I was able to discover these things in music, it positioned me to be really great at creative roles and become an expert in marketing. Prior to my brand work, I was also a piano & oboe teacher. I learned a lot about leading, inspiring, and pushing my students to be the best version of themselves by leaning into their strengths and coaching them around their weaknesses. This definitely helped shape the leader that I am today and has helped me build and lead amazing teams to achieve incredible things that we were and are all proud of. My passion for arts was fueled even more after developing and leading marketing campaigns for new and legendary brands. So many of my learnings can be translated back to the performing arts. How do you take an old opera and make it feel fresh and exciting to a new and modern-day audience? I know how to do that! But instead of putting these skills to work for just one arts organization, I wanted to go bigger. I recently launched a platform that centralizes the performing arts in one location, which is called Red Curtain Addict that also has a recommendation engine to help users find a performance based on their personal interests. Our goal is to help arts enthusiasts to discover, learn and go to the arts with ease and to bridge the gap between arts organizations/artists and audiences so that the performing arts will continue to thrive both locally and globally for generations to come.
Favorite Performer: Yanni.
Follow Kari Lincks Coomans:
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn - @redcurtainaddict
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