Gina Rickicki

Gina Rickicki is a multi-disciplinary artist, performer, show producer, and non-profit administrator, recently hailing from Atlanta, GA. She received the BFA with Honors in Theatre from Long Island University and has spent the ensuing years on stages, screens, in sound booths, and children’s hospitals. She has built a career that features the creation of live performance series designed to build community and uplift audiences. Her current audience-driven cabaret, “Joy Deficit,” will celebrate 3 years of monthly shows in January. This is the latest long-running project she’s created that highlights both new and seasoned artists of many disciplines while cultivating an active, compassionate community.

Rickicki has spent 20 years as an ensemble member at Dad’s Garage Theatre in Atlanta, one of the leading comedy improv theatres in America (that just happens to have been started by a group of young FSU alums). After 10 years as a healthcare clown in children’s hospitals with Laughter League (originally with Big Apple Circus), she deeply understands the transformative power of art and its place as a basic human need. Her years of grant writing have helped highlight the clinical and social value of performing arts, play, and music with an emphasis on empowerment and interpersonal connection.

As most working artists can attest, “chasing your dreams on nights and weekends” means amassing a great number of varied administrative skills and jobs for survival. To be a working artist is to be an entrepreneur with no set hours or guarantees of success in a constantly shifting field. Her current role of Community Engagement Manager at the Center for Music Leadership and Community Engagement synthesizes her years of hard work, heart for service, leadership, and sense of humor. She is thrilled to help connect people to the art in their own backyard, and FSU’s artists to the world beyond. 

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