Managing Director
Tom Arvetis is a values-driven leader with over twenty years’ experience in the Chicago theatre community building adaptive capacity in teams and organizations by nurturing a culture of curiosity, clarity, and collaboration in order to achieve sustained success. In 2021, he served as Working In Concert’s strategy consultant. Later that year, he joined the Oak Park Theatre Festival as Managing Director. He founded the award-winning professional theatre for families and youth, Adventure Stage Chicago, in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood in 2004. Tom brings expertise in community engagement and organizational development to the Festival and has designed and led initiatives supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several state and local foundations and agencies.
As an artist, Tom is an accomplished director and his published plays are regularly performed by professional and amateur theatres across the United States. Tom is an alumnus of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education’s Theater Leadership Institute as well as a former Ann Shaw Fellow with Theatre for Young Audiences/USA. He has served as an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University’s School of Communication and on the boards of the League of Chicago Theatres and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education.
Tom lives in Oak Park with his wife and four children.