The Team

As independent casting directors, we are simultaneously freelancers, small business owners, and small business employees. The following statements are representative of our values and the commitments we’re making as both individuals and as professional entities. We hope that the sharing of these values and actions provide clarity and accountability, and we invite you to use them as a tool for measuring compatibility.

We acknowledge that we’re hired by producers and intend to do the job for which they have hired us, and we will do it very well. We also want to acknowledge it’s possible the way we go about doing that job might seem a little different than it has in the past - we invite you to think of this as a good thing and to ask questions about our methodology at any point along the way. We hope these statements will encourage more fruitful and more meaningful collaboration. 

We are committed to using our positionality to work with our fellow creative team members to create equitable spaces and create an experience that centers the shared humanity of all those involved in the casting process. We are centralizing and sharing this information in hope of creating public accountability.  

We are committed to collaborating with our fellow creative members to assemble casts that present an accurate depiction of our world and to advocate for those in historically marginalized communities. For example, continuing to check if the process has fallen into “white as default” or “whiteness as neutral” thinking - as we know that the global majority is not white and that whiteness is not neutral.

We are committed to developing anti-discriminatory practices that can be realistically upheld, while creating a lasting and impactful safeguard. 

We are committed to increasing transparency in the casting process by keeping performers and talent reps updated throughout the casting process and upon its completion, as best we can.

We are committed to centering the dignity and personhood of all those engaged in the casting process. This means using our positionality to empower performers (as less empowered people in the casting dynamic), by advocating for timelines and additional mechanics of the casting process that will set up performers for success and allow them to present their best work. For example, working with our fellow creative team members to do away with the practice of asking performers to prepare 30+ pages of sides for an audition the next day... or the day after… or at all, in many cases.

We are committed to establishing, supporting, and maintaining a feedback loop that can generate honest suggestions, create accountability, and be a tool for engaging in harm reduction, harm prevention, and relationship repair. 

We are committed to creating intentional environments that dismantle unhelpful power dynamics present in current audition processes. This includes setting up physical audition rooms in ways that don’t put entire creative teams behind a barrier of tables, as well as being mindful of the energy we share with all those involved in the process - performers, accompanists, readers, and our fellow creative team members, etc.

We are committed to asking more questions and pushing through the fear of speaking up and/or dissent and/or making mistakes, in order to remain actively engaged in anti-racism and anti-bias work.

We are committed to de-centering ourselves and allowing space for others to speak up, especially when this will be of greater service to the creative process. This might mean taking a step back and allowing our associate to advocate for something they know more about than we do. We hope demonstrations of power-sharing like this will help dismantle some parts of the current hierarchy that exist within our field and our offices - our collaborators are our collaborators, and we all have something to offer.

We are committed to fully appreciating the generosity of actors and the costs of the audition process, many of which go beyond financial hurdles.

We are committed to advocating for fair wages across the board. We must support the hard work of interns, assistants, associates, etc. with liveable wages that affirm their value and contributions to the casting process.

We acknowledge that there is no uniformly accepted standard for ethics within the casting profession. While we cannot force others to adopt this modality, we can lead by example, encouraging an on-going conversation of how we can reinforce humanity in our respective audition rooms and creative processes. We hope this makes a significant impact on the culture in rehearsal/performance spaces and on sets.

We acknowledge that casting professionals have varying degrees of influence over certain aspects of the casting process.  As we work to have more autonomy in our own processes, we will simultaneously advocate for environments which serve and empower those who are consistently in less empowered positions, such as actors, as well as assistants and interns, etc.

We acknowledge that for independent casting professionals and offices under a certain size, the list of duties are myriad, and often must be accomplished by one or two people. The ability to implement the kinds of practices named above would likely necessitate extra time, more staff, more appropriate financial compensation, and/or any combination of these. As a result, our progress might be slower than we would like, but we commit to continue moving toward these ideals and invite you to use the feedback systems we’re putting in place to help us hold ourselves accountable.