After having a great time interning for the 2012 Ojai Music Festival, I of course applied again to be a marketing intern for the 67th Ojai Music Festival with Mark Morris as the Music Director. I expected to do more or less of the same work as I did last year, since I was interning with the same department, under the same Marketing Director Gina Gutierrez. While 2012 was a great experience, I enjoyed my 2013 experience even more because of the even more diverse tasks I got to take on, as well as seeing old friends from the 2012 Festival.
One of the highlights of my Festival experience was working with Doug McLennan from ArtsJournal.com and Suzi Steffen, our Social Media Coordinator to work on the live stream concerts. OMF now provides live streams of every Libbey Bowl concert, with interviews during intermissions, so I helped Doug manage the live streams before, during and after concerts. It was great to be able to sit through every concert and watch insightful interviews between Doug and special guests. It’s also quite amazing to watch Suzi at work, live-tweeting every event she possibly can during the Festival. If you haven’t checked out our Twitter page, you definitely should.
Mark Morris was the Music Director this year, bringing a lot of energy and dance to the Festival. One very fun community event that happened this year because of him was “Get Fit! With MMDG,” a one-hour morning fitness class taught by two energetic,fun MMDG dancers. The marketing team was put in charge of producing this event, which essentially meant that we had to be there and make sure everything ran smoothly. It was very fun to see an extremely successful event take place (around 60 people came each morning!).
Aside from doing my job every day, it was fun and interesting to watch all of the other interns perform their duties. The production interns were constantly running around, driving artists, making name tags, and seemed to leave the Festival with a slightly frenetic but content disposition. The box office interns dealt with a very wide variety of people, and never failed to deliver some sort of crazy story about a patron at the end of the day. The special events intern was constantly moving to every special event the Festival had, making sure things were running smoothly and patrons were happy. Everybody had their own specific job, but worked together on some projects to ensure the success of the Festival.
It was very fun to come back to familiar faces and meet new ones this year. We have intern dinners and daily intern meetings to see where everyone is at, which adds to the sense of community. It was a wonderful three weeks of friendly faces, beautiful Ojai, and, of course, great music. Ojai Music Festival throws its interns into the storm of a music festival, while giving you all the support you need. It’s a great experience, and I hope to come back next year.
Want to learn more about the internship program? Check out our internship page, which includes links to the application and brochure.
