SANTA ANA, CA / ACCESS Newswire / October 19, 2026 / Ralph Opacic founded Orange County School of the Arts in 1987 and ran it for more than three decades before stepping down in 2021. Since 2011, he has also worked as a consultant with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, founded by Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser in 2001. The institute trains, supports, and empowers arts managers and their boards, locally, nationally, and internationally.
The two roles sit side by side on his resume for a reason. Building OCSA from an idea into one of the top-ranked arts high schools in the country meant learning governance the hard way, through budgets, boards, and the daily decisions that keep a school open.
"Running an arts organization is a different skill than teaching inside one," Opacic said. "A lot of talented artistic directors never get training in the management side. That's the gap the DeVos Institute tries to close."
What the Work Actually Involves
Consulting through the DeVos Institute puts Opacic in front of arts managers and board members who are wrestling with the same questions he faced at OCSA: how to grow programming without losing financial footing, how to build a board that understands its job, how to plan past the next fiscal year.
He draws on his own record of founding and running several arts organizations, including West Coast Musical Theatre Company, West Coast School of the Arts, and Pacific Coast Dance Fest, in addition to OCSA. Each required its own board, its own fundraising, and its own case for why the work mattered to the community around it.
"Boards don't fail because the people on them don't care," he said. "They fail because no one ever showed them what their job actually is. That's true whether it's a small theater company or a school with a hundred staff members."
Governance Experience Beyond One Organization
Opacic's governance work extends past his own schools. He has served as Secretary, Vice President, and President of Arts Schools Network, a national association for arts school leaders, and is currently its Past President. He has also been president of USC's Society of Delta Epsilon and held board or member roles with the Los Alamitos Television Corporation, the Los Alamitos Youth Center, Pathways to Independence, and the Rotary Club of Los Alamitos.
That range of board seats, arts-specific and civic alike, shapes what he brings to the organizations he consults with now.
"You learn different things sitting on a school board than you do on a civic one," he said. "A civic board teaches you how an outside community judges your organization. An arts board teaches you how to protect the mission when the money gets tight. Managers need both lessons."
Why He Separates Training Artists From Training Leaders
Opacic has spent most of his career building programs that train young performers and visual artists. The DeVos Institute work is a different audience entirely: the adults responsible for keeping those programs funded, staffed, and open.
"An arts school can have the best faculty in the country and still close if the people running it don't understand finance or governance," he said. "I didn't learn that in a classroom. I learned it running a school for over thirty years, and I think that's exactly what makes the consulting useful to other organizations now."
He points to the Jeffrey Lawrence Award, presented by Arts Schools Network to recognize arts administrators, as evidence that the field increasingly separates artistic leadership from organizational leadership, and rewards people who can do both.
"Teaching someone to sing or dance and teaching someone to run an institution are two different jobs," he said. "Most arts leaders start out doing the first one. Very few get help with the second. That's the piece I try to fill in."
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About Ralph Opacic
Ralph S. Opacic, Ed.D., founded Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, California, in 1987. Since 2011, he has worked as a consultant with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center, training arts managers and boards across the country. He holds a doctorate in education from the University of Southern California.
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SOURCE: Ralph Opacic
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