With his boyish looks and wide grin, Ty Sutton, the new president and CEO of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, is the first to admit that he’s achieved much already in his career and has yet to turn 50. At 49, Sutton has been a CEO or executive director running the business of performing arts for nearly two decades.
“It happened very young for me. And so, you know, when I think about it, I have been sort of a fixture in my career,” says Sutton. He’s not only been a fixture, but he’s also been a fixer.
“I have run four major performing arts centers now – in Colorado, Texas, Indiana and Ohio, and all of those jobs were coming to solve a problem.”
But when he took over the reins of the Broward Center and its affiliated venues in February, Sutton knew he was inheriting a place that had already been through its fixing.
Kelley Shandling had helmed the performing arts center for 25 years since 2009 before he retired in 2024. Under Shandling, the Broward Center mounted its monumental capital expansion project, “ENCORE! Building Community through the Arts” in 2011. More than $60 million was raised to upgrade the facility to a state-of-the-art performance venue primed for the future.
“Kelley was a great leader and so was Mark Nerenhausen [Broward Center’s CEO from 1998 to 2009] before him,” Sutton says. “I knew both of them very well.”
“I came in here without a mandate,” Sutton says. To put it all in context, he brings up the Broward Center’s history.
“Back in 1987, people weren’t building performing arts centers like this one. And a group of people here for a decade before had said, ‘We need culture. We’re not Miami. We need this.’ Buddy [Robert B.] Lochrie was one of them.”
Lochrie, who passed away in 2009, was the founding chairman of the Broward Performing Arts Foundation in 1985 and was instrumental in getting the required private funding to build the center and create an endowment.
“You know, they went out in the community, and they made promises, and they fulfilled all those promises. But one thing that hasn’t happened and that they didn’t control was this area around the building, which is now going through a massive redevelopment,” Sutton says.
One of the ideas he repeats frequently during the interview, looking out at the picturesque view from the Mary N. Porter Riverview Ballroom, is the notion of the prime spot on which the Broward Center is positioned along the New River.
“I would just love to see us really create this area as a thriving arts and culture district,” he says. He talks about the cultural institutions near Riverwalk: the NSU Art Museum, the Museum of Discovery and Science and Esplanade Park, a frequent location for outdoor performances. “It’s just an opportunity to create,” he says.
Sutton also oversees the Broward Center’s affiliate venues, including the iconic The Parker, formerly known as the Parker Playhouse, which got a $30 million facelift completed in 2021, spearheaded by the Broward Performing Arts Foundation. Also under the Broward Center umbrella is the Rose and Alfred Miniaci Performing Arts Center on the campus of Nova Southeastern University and the Aventura Arts and Cultural Center.
When the lights are up at all four venues, 30 shows can happen in a week, says Sutton.
“You know, it’s interesting. Nationally, if you talk to people in the performing arts, it’s not Miami, it’s Broward. And people know the Broward Center because we have two of the busiest theaters in the country – the Au Rene here at the Broward Center and The Parker.”
SELF RELIANT
There’s a business model that the Broward Center runs on, too, which is different than the other large performing arts center to its south, Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center, and the opposite of most other performing arts centers around the country.
“We’re not financed by government, so we have to perform like a business,” he says. Money from Broward County’s cultural division typically represents only about 1 to 2 percent of funding.
“Government funding doesn’t factor into any of our programming,” says Sutton, so when Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed funding to all arts organizations across the state in June, it had almost no impact on Broward County’s performing arts centers. “We’re a $65 million budget and we get $150,000 from the state, if we’re lucky.”
Sutton talks the numbers like the CEO of a multi-million business. “We’re about 85 percent earned revenue and about 15 percent contributed — a lot of that is from foundations and individual donors.”
He arrived at the Broward Center with a stellar reputation and his own accolades. During his six years as president and CEO of Dayton Live in Dayton, Ohio, five venues were under the Dayton Live brand, including opening the PNC Arts Annex and the Dayton Live Creative Academy, a performing arts education center. Before that, he was executive director of the Butler Arts Center at Butler University in Indianapolis; led the Wagner Noel Performing Arts Center in Midland, Texas; and managed an $8.2 million renovation at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Collins, Colorado, which shut down for a year during its major overhaul.
A COLLEGE HOBBY
The career trajectory to the top of the performing arts venue business started off as a hobby in college. Sutton grew up in San Francisco, then headed to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City – “a big school, 30,000 people.” He majored in political science. “I thought I was going to do law or finance. I knew a lot of people in the finance world.”
And then, he says, he started working on the college’s concert committee. “It was for the student government, and I had grown up in the arts. I sang all through high school, but I knew it was never a career, it was just something I enjoyed, being in different choirs.”
He recalls that it was the mid-1990s and as college students do, those who had committed to putting on the shows started dropping out. “We had a lot of money I could spend and as people bailed, I just kept booking artists.”
He had tenacity and he started calling people and got to know managers who were saying, ‘Hey, you have real money, and you can pay.’’’
The next thing he knew he had booked Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band and Tim Reynolds, member of TR3. He started working for promoters in Salt Lake City. “I really started learning the business.” He did get his degree in political science from the university and met his now wife, Polly, there.
“She was finishing her master’s degree, and I was working there.” After being a successful concert promoter, the university hired him to do their programming. “We met in the arts.”
Polly danced with the Utah Ballet at the University of Utah School of Dance, professionally with Charleston Ballet Theatre, the Anaheim Ballet, American Folk Ballet and has been on the dance faculties at Brigham Young University and Butler University. Since the couple and their two children moved to South Florida, she is enjoying time as a Pilates instructor for Club Pilates Studios at several Broward County locations.
As he continued to be successful in the concert promoting business, Sutton says, “I never thought it was my career. It was always, well, I’ll do this for a while because it’s fun and then I’ll go do finance or get a real grown-up job.”
Then the grown-up job came – he worked for the 2002 Salt Lake Olympic and Paralympic Games and was eventually hired by the National Hockey League’s Anaheim Ducks.
WHAT LIES AHEAD
Now, with Fort Lauderdale at his feet, Sutton says he’s looking decades down the road at what the Broward Center could be. “What do we need to be in the community?” And he understands some hurdles such as the private development happening downtown. “You can find common ground with private developers, and I’ve built a lot in my career, so I get where they’re coming from. But I think if we can lead in terms of continuing to tell our story better about what the experiences we offer mean to people, then developers want in on that – they want to know how they build on that.”
His vision for the Broward Center is that it’s the epicenter of a vital arts and entertainment district. “I think if we all really lean into that with streetscapes and beautification and walkability and restaurants and all the things that, well, that we don’t have right now, I think that’s exactly where we can be. But we still have to stay focused on how we continue to make it worthwhile for people to come here, to keep making the experience better and better.”
His years working in sports honed his strategy in what it takes to excel in the C-suite of a performing arts center. “It’s the same as sports. You have to put out a winning product for people to want to come, right?”
