One of Us

For Patricia Mitchell, new president and CEO of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, returning to Minnesota was something of a homecoming. Though she was raised in Southern California and Texas, she spent her childhood summers here, and one of her first jobs after she graduated from college was at the Guthrie Theater. Mitchell left that job, and Minnesota, more than twenty years ago, however—and when she left, the Ordway wasn’t even built yet.

That Mitchell’s career path ultimately led to the Ordway seems logical and fitting in retrospect, partly because her connection to Minnesota runs so deep. When she was a child, her family spent every summer at a family cabin on a lake in Cass County. “My relatives were Swedes and wanted to find a place as reminiscent of Sweden as possible—pine trees and birch trees near water—and I loved it,” she says. “I decided, why live 2,000 miles from my favorite place when I could live only 200?”

For Mitchell, the Ordway is the latest stop in a remarkable arts career distinguished by the fact that she has not sought out any of the prestigious jobs she has landed over the years; she’s been recruited for every position she has ever held. And so far, the resident organizations of the Ordway—Minnesota Opera, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and The Schubert Club—have greeted Mitchell’s arrival with  enthusiasm. “I am a huge fan,” says Minnesota Opera president Kevin Smith, who has known Mitchell for more than fifteen years. “I have real respect for her. Her reputation is as a blue-chip, top-notch administrator.”

Demand for Mitchell’s talents began immediately after college when she was planning to move to Minnesota. She had a cousin who had been at Yale Law School at the same time that James Baakam, then-prop master at the Guthrie, had been at the Yale School of Drama. Through that connection, Mitchell was hired to be the Guthrie’s director of community services.

After two years at the Guthrie, Mitchell was hired away to work for Arts Development Associates, a firm doing development and marketing for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Opera, and other organizations. “In those days, SPCO was in the Crawford Livingston Theatre [now home to the History Theatre] and the opera performed in the Cedar Village Theatre on the West Bank [now the Cedar Cultural Center],” Mitchell recalls. “It’s amazing to see how those organizations have matured.”

Working for ADA all over the country, Mitchell became acquainted with all different types of arts organizations. But one day while she was in New Brunswick, New Jersey, presenting a feasibility study, she decided she’d had enough. “I was tired of feasibility,” she explains, “and the least feasible thing I knew of was an opera company.”

Counterintuitive as that reasoning may sound, it led to a job as company administrator of the San Francisco Opera, where she had previously turned down a job with Western Opera Theatre, SFO’s touring division. “Apparently, people remembered me,” she says.

After nine years in San Francisco, Mitchell went on to spend eleven years as executive director of the Los Angeles Opera. According to the Minnesota Opera’s Kevin Smith, “Los Angeles Opera began as a $10 million company. It experienced major growing pains and ran big deficits. She was brought in two years later and was key to the company’s [eventual] success.”

In 2000, Mitchell was recruited to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she was intimately involved in the construction of the new Frank Gehry–designed Disney Concert Hall, as well as with the refurbishment of the historic Hollywood Bowl, the 18,000-seat outdoor amphitheater where Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and hundreds of other artists have appeared over the years.

After leaving the Philharmonic, Mitchell spent several months volunteering for the John Kerry presidential campaign, where, Mitchell says, ruefully, she “came to experience politics as blood sport.” She then took a year off. “I went to Italy and Scotland, Paris for Christmas, New York for the Gates [the Christo installation in Central Park], Chicago for the Ring Cycle [Wagner’s operas]. I love to repot myself from time to time,” she explains.