Pilar Castro-Kiltz '10 is the CEO and founder of More Canvas Consulting. With a Master of Fine Arts from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MBA from The Wharton School, Pilar is an exceptional entrepreneur with an artistic heart. As she managed her own dance theater company in New York City, Pilar recognized how much art and business are interconnected. Development tasks, such as cultivating audience loyalty and maintaining relationships with theater sites, all closely resemble essential entrepreneurial skills. This realization inspired her to start More Canvas Consulting to help fellow artists and organizations bridge the gap between their problems and needs through creative solutions. In the years since the firm's founding, Pilar has leaned into some of those hallmark tools of an entrepreneur--agility, innovation, adaptation--and now the expanded company serves clients in diverse sectors, including healthcare, higher education, and social impact.

Pilar has also been consistently contributing to Princeton’s arts and entrepreneurial scene. In 2013, she founded Princeton Arts Alumni, a nonprofit networking and resource platform for Princeton alumni in the arts, and has collaborated with the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council on various projects. In 2020, Pilar gave a workshop on frameworks and techniques from entrepreneurship that can advance your arts business, including how to assess the landscape for your activities, measure and understand your audience of stakeholders, then craft a compelling narrative to inspire them into action at the Arts & Entrepreneurship Day conference by PEC and the Lewis Center for the Arts. 

Now Pilar is mentoring two START Entrepreneurs -  Ebony Noelle Golden and Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa '14. Ebony’s startup, Class for Participation, aims to increase civic participation through theater. She is adapting a theater piece called “City Council Meeting,” co-created by Lewis Center lecturer Aaron Landsman, into a startup called School for Participation. They are working to hone entrepreneurship skills, such as storytelling strategies, pitch preparing, and industry research, to help Ebony shepherd her startup ideas. 

Tanyaradzwa is working to build a scalable platform to help heal the traumas of colonialism through reclaiming and spreading indigenous culture and ancestral knowledge. Her first project, Global Zimbabwe, focuses on preserving the culture of Zimbabwe.

“The founders I have been mentoring through START and other programs have the vision for creating a machine, a business or organization that is going to generate value and affect change,” said Pilar. “I enjoy working with them and contributing to that mechanism for impact and value creation.”