Road to Innovation Expo 2026: Showcase
For aspiring actors, finding their next audition can feel like a second full-time job. Performers must cobble together information from Instagram accounts, Facebook groups, email lists and shared Google Docs, sometimes spending eight hours or more just searching for where to show up next.
A team of Stevens School of Business students chose their senior design entrepreneurship project to tackle that problem, building Showcase, an online platform that combines digital networking, portfolio hosting and audition discovery into one space designed specifically for theater professionals.
The idea emerged from a personal connection to the industry. Project leader Ryder Bidwell, a business and technology major who has performed in theater since childhood, watched a friend and fellow actor spend an entire workday just trying to locate audition opportunities.
“She explained the whole process to me, needing to follow these different Instagrams and scrape these different Facebook groups to find people, and open up some random Google Drive that someone made five years ago,” Bidwell said. “It made me realize there’s a market here and there’s so much engagement, but it’s scattered across 20 different platforms that aren’t optimized for it.”
The five-member business team partnered with five computer science students to bring the platform to life. The business side handled market research, strategy and outreach, conducting more than 100 interviews with actors, creatives and hiring professionals. The computer science team built the site, resulting in a platform where users can create a customizable professional profile, similar to LinkedIn but tailored to the arts. Users are also able to create a portfolio website with embedded video, audio and photos, connect with other professionals through social networking features, and search for auditions pulled from across the internet into a single feed.
“The theater industry is really dominated by three big companies or platforms — Playbill, Backstage and Actors Access — that really don’t have a friendly interface,” explained Nicole Cheung, a business and technology major with concentrations in marketing, visual arts and technology. “There’s no space right now for actors to communicate in a professional way. LinkedIn wasn’t really built for the creative space.”
The School of Business Team
Ethan Barnes, Business & Technology
Ryder Bidwell, Business & Technology
Natalia Brunetti, Business & Technology
Nicole Cheung, Business & Technology
Juliana Gomez, Business & Technology
Faculty Advisor: Alfred Bentley, Adjunct Professor
Q&A with the Showcase Team
What problem is Showcase trying to solve?
Ryder Bidwell: “When you’re trying to look for auditions right now, it’s kind of trial and error for a very long period of time. You need to know which Instagram accounts to follow, you need to know what email list to get on. You need to know what physical open call auditions to go to in the city. Do I get there at 6 a.m. or 5 a.m.? How do I get my name on the Google Drive that I need to be on in order to get this information? It’s trial and error and understanding these kind of quirky institutional systems that they have right now that there’s not really a guidebook for.”
Nicole Cheung: “I'm on the board for the Stevens Dramatic Society, and we hire professionals. It's really difficult for us to find people sometimes. It's $50 to post an ad on Playbill, and it limits the amount of people and the type of people. We have trouble finding people, but we know that there are people looking for jobs."
How did your academic work at Stevens prepare you for this project?
Ryder Bidwell: “All of the things that I learned about how to run a business, how to make decisions, how to manage people, how to pitch, all these different things are directly related to my coursework and have been verified against my work experience in parallel with the actual coursework that I’m doing.”
Julianna Gomez: “My project management and entrepreneurship classes definitely helped me prepare for a project like this. They exposed me to tools that I can use to facilitate processes among the team. Also, my decision-making class has been very helpful. Sometimes when you’re in a team, you need to make tough decisions and not everyone might agree, but you have to prioritize what’s important.”
What has it been like working cross-functionally with the computer science team?
Nicole Cheung: “We’re interviewing professionals and asking them about what they would like in a platform like Showcase. Then, we are communicating those features that we would like to see built into the platform. The CS team is trying to make that come to life. We go back and forth with them about building it and trying to market it.”
Julianna Gomez: “Working across disciplines really prepares you for the workforce because you’re not going to be confined to one department or one side. I’m a business and technology major, and that’s really what I would be working with in the future. I want to be at the intersection of business and tech, business and computer science.”
What was the biggest challenge the team faced?
Ryder Bidwell: “I think the biggest challenge was the psychological challenge of building something and believing in yourself that you can bring it to the place that it needs to be. Once you start to get traction — we have users on this site now, this is real, this isn’t just something I’m doing for fun — how do I translate this into something real and something useful? That was the scariest part for me.”
Natalia Brunetti: “The biggest challenge has been finding a way for everyone to have their part. Also, in the initial stage, we had to find 100 people to interview, and each one was 30 minutes long. That was very difficult because people in this industry are busy. They’re always meeting people, and they have a lot of auditions, but I think they did realize that this is a very promising platform that could help them.”
What is the most important lesson you’ve taken away from this experience?
Nicole Cheung: “The biggest thing that I've learned is the actual process. You can learn about entrepreneurial process through class, but I feel like I've really gotten an up-close experience. We had a pitch presentation, and we got to talk to actual investors and get real-life feedback about what we were good at and the investability of our company. I feel like if we had just spoken about it and not actually had something come to life, then we wouldn't have had that opportunity."
Natalia Brunetti: “I think for me, the biggest takeaway is that I've learned not just about the product itself, but the way that I like to work in a group and what I like in leadership. I think I'm very good at executing. I'm a very quick learner, and I think that if someone guides me well and actually tells me what needs to get done, then I can definitely get that done. I like clarity and knowing what's going on, so that I can better prepare myself and know what the next steps are."
