About the Program
At Citadel Securities, colleagues are encouraged to use their expertise to strengthen the communities where they live and work. Through the firm’s Community Leaders program, which provides nonprofit board matching, governance training and financial support, employees are helping organizations around the world advance their missions and create lasting impact.
How Kaiwen Zheng Helps Cellunova Productions Build Audiences and Expand Opportunity
As a quantitative researcher on the Options team at Citadel Securities, Kaiwen Zheng spends her workdays analyzing complex problems. Outside the office, she applies that same discipline as a board member and Marketing Director of Cellunova Productions.
Founded in 2023 by a first-generation Asian immigrant, Cellunova is a multidisciplinary theater company that stages socially engaged work fusing bold storytelling from emerging voices with new technology. Its core team has fewer than 10 members, most of whom, like Kaiwen, work full time in other fields. As a board member, Kaiwen helps the independent theater company reach audiences from industries and communities that are underrepresented on stage and create opportunities for artists whose perspectives rarely reach the larger New York venues.
Kaiwen’s path into theater began as an unexpected detour. While completing her doctorate in physics at Princeton University, she signed up for a career trip and selected finance as her first choice. When that option filled, she joined the arts and theater track on a whim, spending an afternoon at Cellunova Productions, a small independent theater staffed, in part, by fellow Princeton alumni. The experience made Kaiwen realize that she might have an untapped talent for theater production.
After graduating in summer 2024, Kaiwen asked Cellunova how she could get involved. The company had immediate marketing needs, so Kaiwen helped drive interest in a legal drama by pitching group ticket packages to law firms. She then organized multiple collaborations and talkbacks for the production, filling the house every night. It wasn’t long before she assumed the marketing director role and took a seat on the board.
Her role has since expanded well beyond promotion. Because ticket sales shape many of Cellunova’s decisions, Kaiwen weighs in on scheduling, artist selection and how new plays are positioned. She screens scripts, participates in auditions and helps connect the company’s artistic ambitions with the hands-on, logistical work involved in staging a production that will draw a crowd.
This year, she helped choose Cellunova’s fall production from over 200 submissions by emerging playwrights. The production, The Recursion of a Moth by Brandon Zang, is a science-fiction work that explores themes like time travel, memory and diaspora.
Kaiwen was also pleasantly surprised to find herself using her scientific background when she joined the design team tasked with building a robot for a science-fiction production.
Through Citadel Securities’ Community Leaders program, Kaiwen leveraged annual financial support for Cellunova, helping the company plan ahead for the upcoming season. The funding helps offset production costs, so the team can devote more energy toward developing new work, expanding its audience and creating opportunities for emerging artists.
For Kaiwen, the work also provides much-needed perspective.
“It’s very easy to get lost in your day-to-day work,” she says. Staying engaged with the community, she adds, “reinforces the sense of responsibility to contribute to something that’s beyond the workplace.”
Visit Cellunova Productions to learn more.
Visit our Civic Leadership page to learn more about Citadel Securities’ Community Leaders program.
