(NEWARK, NJ) -- New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) has announced that Lisa Schroeder has been named the organization's Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer, a new role. Schroeder formally joined NJPAC's senior leadership team earlier this month.
Schroeder most recently served as Chief Administrative Officer of Film at Lincoln Center, a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form, based at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Schroeder had served in multiple leadership roles at Lincoln Center since 2014. As Vice President of Finance and Operations at Lincoln Center, she led the organization’s COVID-19 reopening committee, as well as all budgeting and financial reporting and analysis.
“When I migrated from corporate finance to non-profit arts finance and management, I fell in love with all kinds of performing arts,” Schroeder said. “But what NJPAC is doing in Newark — through leading-edge work in arts education, arts in healthcare and real estate redevelopment — is not just supporting the arts, it’s harnessing the arts to have a transformative impact on a community. I want to be a part of that mission of changing lives, changing neighborhoods, for the better through the performing arts.”
Schroeder will collaborate with multiple departments across the Arts Center to oversee finances and advance the institution’s strategic planning and social impact work. These will be complex endeavors as the Arts Center prepares to open in 2027 the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center — a newly-constructed home for NJPAC’s Arts Education, Community Engagement and Arts & Well-Being departments — as well as the ArtSide residential real estate development on the NJPAC campus and Lionsgate Newark, New Jersey’s first purpose-built film and television production studio.
NJPAC has grown rapidly over the past decade and a half; its budget, at $25 million in 2011, now hovers at $75 million, with almost $8 million spent on social impact programs each season.
“Part of Lisa’s brief will be to workshop ways we can seamlessly integrate our robust social impact spend into the Arts Center's broader business model,” said John Schreiber, President and CEO of NJPAC. “The volume of free programming and low-cost community-focused initiatives that NJPAC presents and produces each season is financially challenging. Lisa’s unique skill set will help the Arts Center not only ensure that those programs are sustainable, but will amplify their impact in years to come.”
Schroeder grew up in Austin, Texas, and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in finance and accounting. After launching her career in corporate finance, she became a financial consultant first in Telluride, Colo., and later in New York City, focusing on nonprofit organizations.
The New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), located in downtown Newark, New Jersey, is an anchor cultural institution for both the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey. It is an artistic, cultural, educational and civic center where great performances and events enhance and transform lives every day. NJPAC brings communities together both on and off of our campus – on stages, in schools and community settings – providing access to the arts for all and showcasing the state’s and the world’s best artists, while acting as a leading catalyst in the revitalization of its home city. Through its extensive Social Impact programs, NJPAC leverages the arts to advance positive outcomes in education, health and well-being, civic engagement and community development. NJPAC has attracted more than 12.7 million visitors (including more than two million children) since opening its doors in 1997.
