As it prepares for the 75th-anniversary celebration of the Sailor Circus and its own 27th season of Circus Sarasota, the Circus Arts Conservatory is making a long-planned change in leadership.

Jennifer Mitchell, who joined the organization in 2008 as a marketing and public relations coordinator and served the last 10 years as executive vice president and chief operating officer, has been promoted to president and CEO.

Co-founders and artistic leaders Pedro Reis and Dolly Jacobs are moving into new roles while remaining active in the organization. Reis is now the production and artistry strategist and will produce the annual winter Circus Sarasota show that opens in February. He also is working on developing a circus festival in the area. Jacobs serves as vice president and will continue to work with Sailor Circus students and be a spokesperson for the organization and circus in general.

The change also comes as Reis and Jacobs, who were married in 2007, move through divorce proceedings after 17 years of marriage.

Mitchell said she couldn’t have had better mentors. “I trained and worked very closely with Pedro and Dolly. Dolly was a different type of mentor in terms of her heritage because of the kind of historical figure she is in the circus arts.”

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Jacobs was a popular aerial artist who performed for many years with Circus Sarasota after touring with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus among other circus troupes internationally. She is the daughter of the late clown Lou Jacobs. In 2015 she became the first circus performer to receive the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reis began performing circus acts, specializing in the flying trapeze in his native Cape Town, South Africa, created a flying act that toured Europe and performed for Ringling Bros. He also created the first circus school in South Africa.

In 1994 Jacobs and Reis began performing together in an aerial act “On the Wings of Love” and in 1997 created the National Circus School of Performing Arts, which was later renamed Circus Sarasota. When the organization acquired the Sailor Circus in 2013, it was renamed the Circus Arts Conservatory.

In addition to its big top tent shows, CAC offers a variety of educational programs, including Circus Science and the Marvelous, Miraculous Circus Machine.  In the last fiscal year, it presented 250 performances to 117,000 people and worked with 9,000 students at 45 schools in five counties. It also trained more than 120 year-round student circus athletes at its Sailor Circus Academy. The Sailor Circus 75th Anniversary Diamond Jubilee show runs Dec. 26-29 in the Sailor Circus Arena.

Strengthening circus organization for the future

“We want Pedro and Dolly to receive all the acknowledgments for the way they laid the foundation for this organization and now we’ll put pillars on top of that foundation and pass it on to the next generations,” Mitchell said. “They’re still with us and committed to putting those pillars up.”

In a statement, board chair Shari Ashman described Mitchell as “a highly effective leader with proven ability to consistently position CAC for success as a rapidly-evolving organization.” Reis said her “passion and knowledge of the CAC’s business model, educational programming and community outreach is unsurpassed.”

Mitchell, 47, said she doesn’t expect the transition to mean drastic changes for the organization.

“This is an opportunity to embrace change and continue to steer CAC forward,” she said. “New leadership always brings new ideas, but I was bringing that to the founders over the last decade and we were doing that in a really successful way.”

Circus NationA look at Circus Sarasota at National Folklife Festival

During Mitchell’s tenure, the organization acquired the Sailor Circus, the nation’s longest-operating and largest youth circus training program, and was expanded to become the Circus Arts Conservatory. The organization brought its big top and coordinated a circus showcase for the 2017 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., which had a focus on circus.

Mitchell came to the organization after a year in the development department at Ringling College of Art and Design and 10 years leading the Miss America Teen organization.

The circus world also has become more personal because her daughter Emma Clarke, who trained for 10 years with the Sailor Circus Academy, is now pursuing a professional circus career. She is performing this winter in Nik Wallenda’s “Wonderland Illuminate,” a holiday show presented with the Circus Arts Conservatory.

Mitchell said she has been lucky that “all my positions have not been jobs. They’ve been passion projects.” Seeing how her daughter found her own passion through the Sailor Circus “motivates me. I can share that with a lot of other children and our team can go out and do more of that. It’s personal.”

The executive may not come from a multi-generational circus family, “but maybe I’m starting one. Someone has to be the first. It starts somewhere.”

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