Meet The Staff - Chao LI
Meet Chao Li: a comedian, writer, and our incredible Ticketing Coordinator! Chao has been working at GCTC for just over 6 months, starting in this role in October 2021. He studied finance and economics in university, and can confirm that it’s VERY different than working in the arts. After those studies, he moved on to study script writing for tv, movie, and theatre. Some of what he wrote was comedy, but he also wrote sci-fi and murder mystery.
So what made him want to start working at GCTC? He says it’s the perfect place for him. He uses his previous experience from office environments on a daily basis, but in the environment of Art and theatre. Day-to-day, Chao’s work handles everything that comes after you buy your ticket to see a show! He pulls all the data from our ticketing system and puts it in another template report, so that the data can be transcribed into an accounting system. When there’s a new show open, he has to build the ticket event and make sure it’s up and running in terms of price and seating for every show. He also keeps an eye on the event daily to see if there’s anything that needs to be updated. After the run of each show, he has to generate the report about the show. How many tickets were sold, and how much revenue was generated.
Outside of GCTC, Chao has recently started doing stand-up comedy, which he is doing in the community club at Absolute Comedy! No performances yet, but stay tuned (maybe!) “It’ll depend on how the jokes land”, he says.
When asked what he loves about GCTC, Chao said: “I really like the people here. We care about each other. Everyone is very nice. And also, the atmosphere here is not just a place for work, it’s also full of people with different talents. I like to have conversations with others about different kinds of art and scripts. I noticed that the arts circle in Ottawa is so small. It’s a very small world and makes it feel like there’s a family in this city.”
If you have any questions for Chao, you can contact him at chao@gctc.ca, or catch him in the Box Office!