Who

Elena Holy is a founder and current artistic director of The New York International Fringe Festival, the annual downtown theater institution.

Backstory

Georgia native Holy was Broadway producer Richard Frankel's assistant for seven years before she founded the Fringe Fest (named after the original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh) in 1996 as a venue for small, edgy, off-off Broadway productions. After running the Fest as a side project for two years, Holy finally quit her day job in 1998 to run it full-time via her production company, The Present Company. The Fringe Festival has exploded in both size and popularity since then: it now features some 200 shows (chosen from over 1,000 submissions), sells 75,000 tickets, stages acts at 20 different downtown performance sites, and has even birthed several bona fide commercial hits. Some 1,200 volunteers and 70 staffers labor to make the immense operation go off smoothly, although, incredibly, only Holy and her assistant are full-time employees.

Of note

Fringe NYC has served as a launching pad for offbeat successes like Urinetown (which became a much-hyped, Tony-awarded Broadway musical), Matt & Ben, Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame, and Dog Sees God, a modern version of the Peanuts cartoon, which featured Eliza Dushku, America Ferrara and Eddie Kaye Thomas. The festival has also become a place for agents and producers to spot up-and-coming talent. Two much-applauded entries from recent years: Silence! The Musical, which got picked up by the Bleecker Street Theater; and Walmartopia, which transferred to Broadway in September 2007. Highlights from the typically eccentric 2007 Fest's highlights included Williamsburg: The Musical, an acid parody of the eponymous neighborhood, and Farmtrucks, a musical about coffeeshop workers vying for gold in a Barista Olympics.

Drama

Even though Fringe NYC is regarded by many as a champion of low-budget, democratic theater, for some people it's still too commercial. In 2007 a group calling itself Phuck the Phringe protested by holding a rival theater festival with the same run dates as the Fringe. PhringeNYC's specific beefs: that FringeNYC charges a $550 entry fee, keeps $6.25 of each $15 ticket sold, and retains 2 percent of all authors royalties over $20,000 for any play that manages to transfer.

Personal

Holy lives in Carroll Gardens and makes occasional trips down south to her family farm in Georgia.