NEW YORK CITY: Signature Theatre Company has announced that interim executive director Timothy J. McClimon will fully assume the E.D. position as of July 1, continuing his work alongside artistic director Paige Evans. Following a national search by Arts Consulting Group, the board of trustees’ E.D. Search Task Force, led by Nina Matis, has decided to officially welcome McClimon six months after he stepped into the temporary position.
“I’m thrilled Tim is joining us in a permanent capacity,” said Evans in a statement. “He began this work with us at a time of great upheaval for our industry, and he has jumped in and is doing an incredible job with a steady hand and a wise approach to leadership. Tim has been a wonderful partner: From the very start, he felt like a member of the team, bringing with him so much momentum, and a spirit of rebuilding, on the heels of our return season to in-person programming.”
Timothy J. McClimon (Tim) is a strategic nonprofit and social responsibility executive who works to align organizational interests with stakeholder needs to optimize shared value creation. From 2006 to 2021, McClimon was president of the American Express Foundation and senior vice president, corporate social responsibility at the American Express Company. In this position, he led all the company’s social responsibility, philanthropy, sustainability, and employee engagement programs globally. From 2003 to 2006, McClimon was executive director at Second Stage Theater, one of the largest nonprofit theater companies in New York City. From 1996 to 2003, McClimon directed the programmatic, operational, financial, and legal aspects of AT&T’s global philanthropy and corporate citizenship programs. McClimon is an adjunct professor of Performing Arts Administration at New York University and previously taught at Johns Hopkins University and Brooklyn College.
“Signature has a unique and important mission in the ecosystem of U.S. theatre,” said McClimon in a statement. “The playwrights Signature supports are national treasures, and deserve to be celebrated and produced in the best possible way in the best possible facility. The organization’s commitment to creating a beautiful home for playwrights that lends itself to their work is what drew me to Signature as a funder, as an audience member, and now as executive director. It’s an honor to continue my partnership with Paige and the Signature staff.”
Signature Theatre Company is a nonprofit Off-Broadway theatre based in the Pershing Square Signature Center, a three-theatre facility on New York’s West 42nd Street. The company strives to be an artistic home for storytellers. Signature operates via a Playwright-in-Residence model with the Spotlight Residency, which offers an intensive exploration of a single writer’s body of work; the Premiere Residency, which supports playwrights as they build a body of work by guaranteeing each writer three productions over a five-year period; and the Legacy Program, which invites writers from both residencies to premiere or reproduce earlier plays. As of 2019, Signature Theatre had a budget of approximately $14.9 million.
