Q&A with Jeremy Ganter, Executive Director of the Mondavi Center

Portrait by Andri Tambunan

How is the new job so far?

It’s good. I became interim executive director on Sept. 1, so I had a little bit of a run-up to the official gig, which was nice. Our first three shows [of the 2023-24 season] sold out, which is great. The performances themselves have been particularly good. And we have a really fantastic team. We have quite a few staff members—particularly at the leadership level—who have been here a while. So it’s an already jelled team that’s ready to take on the future with a new executive director.

Your predecessor, Don Roth, spent 17 seasons as the Mondavi Center’s executive director before retiring last summer. You had long served as associate executive director and director of programming. Did you always envision succeeding him?

Becoming the executive director is something that I always wanted to do, specifically at the Mondavi Center. I love this place. Don and I worked very, very closely together. Our programming model was that both of us didn’t necessarily have to like something, but one of us did. He gave me a lot of latitude to program in the areas where I had deep knowledge, like jazz and modern dance. He had knowledge in them too, but he had deeper knowledge in areas like classical music and orchestral music. So we fit together really nicely as a pair. Part of Don’s extraordinary gift as a leader was that he was very clear, but he was also incredibly collaborative and open to everybody’s voices. I really felt like I had a place at the table working with him.

What are your top priorities as you settle into the role?

The most important—or certainly the most fun—[part of the role] is the artistic piece. Being the executive director, I can’t be involved day-to-day in negotiating with agents and the other kinds of things that I did as director of programming. But I will set the artistic vision and make specific artistic choices with the programming team. [Another] piece is being the face of the center—engaging with the campus, engaging with the community, and fundraising, which is a big piece of the job.

How does your approach differ from Don’s? What are a few ways you might put your stamp on the institution? 

The first 20 years of the Mondavi Center were really about establishing our identity and artistic brand. We had a very close focus on establishing ourselves as a premier presenter of touring arts. And we’ll continue to do that, but we also want to partner more deeply with, for example, the [neighboring] Manetti Shrem Museum. I can see two types of partnerships there—one where we’re potentially doing small concerts at the museum, and another where the artists that we’re presenting at the Mondavi Center [reflect] the artists being exhibited at the Manetti Shrem, either the artists themselves or the subject of the artists’ work. I’ve had incredibly interesting conversations about partnering with the [Shields] Library to see if we could occasionally send musicians to perform there. They actually have some really beautiful performance spaces, and well over a million people come through that library every year, so to be able to present to them is really attractive. And of course, there are obvious partners like the music department. It is the culture of this campus to be interdisciplinary and collaborative. I intend to respond to that.

READ MORE: The Mondavi at 20 – Don Roth discusses the center’s history and impact for its 20th anniversary

You started at the school as a temp and transitioned to full-time positions as an executive assistant, then an artistic administrator at UC Davis Presents—which became the Mondavi Center—a year before the Mondavi even opened. As you were rising through the ranks, was there a point where you thought, “I could really spend my career here?” 

A lot of us who do this kind of work—me included—are people who originally set out to be a professional musician or a professional performing artist of some type. My instrument is the guitar, specifically jazz guitar. I started playing seriously when I was 11 years old. I wanted to be Pat Metheny or John Scofield or Bill Frisell. I realized that I was good, but I wasn’t great, and I wasn’t really going to have the kind of onstage career that I wanted to have.

Way back when I was at the initial job at UC Davis Presents, [a colleague] said, “There’s something about the moment when the curtain goes up, and there’s this magic that happens when the performance starts that is addictive and beautiful, and there’s nothing like it.” She said to go experience that for a while and see if that resonated with me. It absolutely did, and it still does. So that was the initial spark. This idea that I’m stronger backstage than onstage proved to be true.

What are some milestones that stand out from your two decades at the Mondavi Center?

Certainly, the opening of the Mondavi Center itself. My literal first day on the job as a career employee was the day of the topping-out ceremony for the Mondavi Center—the day they finished the metal frame. Being part of a startup on that scale was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra played a “hard-hat concert” for the construction workers and the staff who got the Mondavi Center built and open. That was a remarkable milestone: To have everybody in the room who dreamed this dream, and then get to hear music in the hall for the first time together, was remarkable.

Then I would say the 10th anniversary was kind of an incredible moment for us because we had Ballet Preljocaj, the French dance company, come and present the United States premiere of this extraordinary and massive production of Snow White. It was a huge leap forward for us, and it was very intentional for us that we would do something that big for our 10th anniversary. We wanted to say, “This is what we’ve become in 10 years. We’re now a powerful enough force in the arts to present a United States premiere of a major work by a major dance company.”

As we look ahead to 2024, are there any programs coming up that you might recommend?

The dance company Grupo Corpo, which will be here on March 13, is the company that made me fall in love with modern dance. It’s one of the things that is truly stunning to see at the Mondavi Center.

My absolute favorite thing to program is the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre—the little black box theater on the side of the Mondavi Center—in its club format. It is an extraordinary space with really good acoustics, and we turn it into a 184-seat jazz club. It has four-top tables, and there’s a bar. There’s a stage in the room. When you’re in there, you could be in one of the great jazz clubs in the world. And what that space has reached is what I always refer to as the holy grail of programming: Audiences will come for the experience of being in that room. They will trust us on the programming, even if they don’t know who the performers are.

At this moment, there’s an enormous number of young, up-and-coming and very diverse jazz artists who fit perfectly in that club. For example, Sean Mason is a pianist who just put out his first album. I saw him in New York last year and was just blown away. I was like, “We have to bring him right away.” The earliest we could do it is this fall, so he’ll be here in October. That’s a specific example, but that’s a type of artist and a type of experience that I’m really excited about doing more of next season. And what that also allows us to do is, if there’s a jazz artist that we think we’re going to have a long relationship with, but they’re not ready for Jackson Hall [which seats 1,801], we can bring them in and build them up to the point where we can eventually put them in Jackson Hall. So it speaks to our mission of helping artists develop their careers as well.

How have audience tastes changed in recent years, and what further changes can you anticipate as you start to plan for the future?

In the early phases of emerging from the pandemic we saw what I would describe as almost a discomfort with coming out into the public. Some of that simply had to do with people saying, “The virus is still in the air. I don’t know if I’m safe.”

But there was another piece of it that I found interesting: People have become really comfortable at home. If I want to have an entertainment experience, I can sit on my couch in comfortable clothes and watch what I want at the volume that I want. I can pause it. I can get food when I want. When people returned to this more constricted environment, there was this very visceral discomfort. We’d get a lot of feedback around this idea that, “I just don’t like the fact that I’m no longer fully in control of this experience.” That has mostly gone away, and people have gotten used to the slight discomforts of not being at home and [embraced] the greater good of being able to see something live.

I’m generalizing, but there’s more interest in social media engagement before, during—particularly during—and after performances. There’s interest in shorter performances, and there’s a much larger percentage of people who don’t want to be told, “Sit down, be quiet and stare at the stage for 90 minutes.” They want interaction. They want to be able to move. One of the nuts I’d like to crack for the future—and we’re already doing a little work on this—is to respond to that.

For example, dancing at the Mondavi Center. For a lot of the genres we present, people tell us that they want to dance, and that is totally appropriate. The venue doesn’t perfectly lend itself to dancing, because if you get up to dance in a seated house like ours, you’re inevitably going to be in front of somebody who’s not going to want to stand up. So we’re working on finding ways to create dance sections, particularly for the Latinx programming that we do. It reflects a priority of mine and of the current team here, which is getting away from the more traditional classical model and finding ways to break down that fourth wall and have more engagement during the performances.

Looking deeper into the crystal ball, what’s an example of a longer-term change that you foresee?

One big change that people will see under my leadership is a lot more of our programming getting released on a rolling basis rather than in the big book [that describes performances in the upcoming season] that we put out in the spring. We’ll still do that, but the book will be smaller, and there’ll be a lot more performances added throughout the year.

There are very few people who are willing to say, “Oh, I want to see an orchestra 18 months from now,” and that’s understandable. So that has triggered a change in how we sell.

I suspect that 10 years from now, our programming will be completely on a rolling basis. That’s not just because audience behavior has changed, but because I suspect that’s where the artist and management side is moving: to a six-month time horizon versus an 18-month time horizon for most things. If we want to play in the sandbox and have performers like Wanda Sykes [whose appearance at the Mondavi Center this May was announced after the season started], we have to be nimble and quick. 

This interview has been edited for length, flow and clarity. For more info, visit mondaviarts.org

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