Carina Leland
Carina Leland (she/they)
Carina grew up singing, dancing, and loving stories of all forms in Silverton, Oregon. In high school, this developed into a love for musical theater and an interest in pursuing a career in the field. She graduated from Chapman University in May 2025, earning a BA in Theatre, emphasizing in Technical Theatre. They also dabbled in film with a minor in Business of Entertainment and as a member of Delta Kappa Alpha, a professional cinematic fraternity.
Carina’s main area of focus is stage management, as she loves being part of the energy in the rehearsal room and keeping the virtual and physical space organized. She prioritizes leading with kindness, from working with a youth performer who had a bad performance to communicating design needs to her production team.
To be a successful stage manager, Carina strongly believes in having a well-rounded theater experience. They greatly enjoyed their time working for their college’s production management department. This position gave them experience in a wide variety of technical areas, including carpentry, electrics, and props supervision. She has also dived into administrative roles, from being the production manager for two musicals produced by a student club at Chapman, to completing the 2026 General and Company Management FAIR Assistantship at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
While she mainly aims to pursue stage management, Carina also hopes to dabble in production management and film. She is interested in continuing to explore a variety of locations, including Seattle, Chicago, New England, and London. She hopes to tell stories that can give the wider world a greater understanding of disabled and queer communities.
Memories
Artistic Manifesto
I do theatre because it is the most versatile and all-encompassing form of art. It is the combination of so many others: take sets, costumes, and projections from visual art. Take song and dance from other performing arts industries. Take complex stories and suspension of disbelief from books. Put all of this directly in front of you; it’s a magical experience because the story is being created in real time. Even if you are able to go on a film set, special effects often come together in postproduction. Theatre is the closest thing we have to magic. Art gives so much life and personality to the world, and has endless possibilities to impact. To paraphrase a quote from the Dead Poets Society, doctors, lawyers, and the like enable us to live in this world, but art is the reason we live. Why not combine so many aspects into one and create infinitely more possibilities?
Theatre is my connection. My connection to the people around me, to people I don’t understand, and to the world. Creating a production not only needs actors, directors, stage managers and designers, but administrators and audience members. It is the culmination of ideas from so many different people, and also the birthplace of ideas for others. By being in the room with creatives, I am thrust into endless new perspectives. I know I don’t have all the best ideas in the world, but by being in the room with creative people I will constantly find new pieces of information. I facilitate others’ dreams as a stage manager because often it is so much more interesting to learn about the people around you than to constantly think of yourself. And oftentimes I learn about myself in the process. Theatre is my place to learn.
