Artists Who Code was born out of Catherine Ricafort McCreary and Scott McCreary's deep frustrations working as full-time artists.
, who performed as the Elphaba understudy in Broadway’s “Wicked” and now works as a software engineer and arts educator in Chicago; Melinda Sewak, a Nashville-based actor and singer who works in data analytics, and Nick Spangler, a former Broadway actor who now works as a software engineer for a digital theater ticketing platform.
When Ricafort McCreary was cast as Karen the Computer in the 2018 production of “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical,” it felt like a career high. Yet the role, though glamorous, was just a band-aid over a deep wound, she says. When the job ended, she struggled once again with low-paying work and being unemployed, earning just $10,000 in 2019.
LinkedIn is often another hurdle for artists. Ricafort McCreary hadn’t used LinkedIn until she applied for jobs in engineering. She didn’t have an “appropriate” professional photo, “so I took a screenshot from an audition tape I had made for the role of a teacher,” she says, laughing. The couple learned they had to compress their wins in the arts to make room for tech.
Being part of Artists Who Code was helpful as he worked through coding questions. But more important, seeing other artists make the transition served as inspiration that he could do it too. “Maybe the pure artistic types see getting a day job like this as selling out or giving up,” Ricafort McCreary says. “We’re really trying to reframe that.”