“My thing was making people laugh, and I could do that.” For Eric Jensen, founder of The Off Broadway Theatre, comedy came long before theater became a career. Growing up in Murray as one of seven children, he was surrounded by a close family and parents who supported whatever he decided to pursue. As a boy, he loved watching Carol Burnett, Tim Conway, and Harvey Korman. Eric then reenacted their sketches for friends, whether or not he fully understood the jokes.

“By the end of that first year, we were kind of at a turning point - either we sell the building and move on, or we figure out how to really make the building work for us.” That moment, equal parts terrifying and clarifying, belongs to John Simianer and Peyton Wunderli, the architects behind The Pearl on Main. Their path to owning one of Midvale’s most iconic buildings, now home to an event space and architecture office, was not mapped out in a business plan. It unfolded the way many meaningful things do - through partnership, instinct, and a willingness to pivot when something is not working.

“That’s kind of all I knew. The old saying is 'being born in a trunk.'” The theater has been part of James Parker’s life for as long as he can remember. Today, the Parker Theatre, located on State Street in South Salt Lake, is a 200-seat Art Deco playhouse that was once the Avalon Theater, a one-screen cinema from the 1940s that had fallen into disrepair.

“What we do is share stories. At the very heart of it, we take the written word, the passed-down tale, the brand-new idea, and we project it into real life so a room full of people can feel it together.” As Managing Director of Pioneer Theatre Company, Adrian Budhu lives by those words every day. His life traces a beautiful arc of places, people, and purpose - an arc that explains why that sentence lands with such conviction.

I always think of an art house as the new gathering place for stories and ideas. Film is such an accessible art form. You can have a film about anything. So, you can have a conversation about anything.” Tori A. Baker, CEO of Salt Lake Film Society,  has had her life shaped by that belief.