We're a nonprofit out of Rancho Cordova, California built by theater nerds who care more about what's happening behind the scenes than center stage.

TE4TN offers free classes in the craft that makes a show go — lighting, sound, stage effects, rigging, and all the technical magic audiences feel but never see.

If you've always been more curious about how the fog machine works than who's playing the lead, you've found your people!

Key Officers

Joel Watson | Founder & Executive Director

Joel's story starts where a lot of great ones do — in the back of a high school theater, more interested in the lighting board than the script. That obsession never went away. After years of progressively ambitious home haunts, he opened Heartstoppers Haunted House in 2007, growing it into Sacramento's largest and longest-running professional haunted attraction, drawing 14,000+ visitors a year. But unlike most haunt founders who stopped there, Joel built something underneath it: a free, year-round technical theater education program that brings industry professionals in to teach the next generation of kids who'd rather wire a DMX system than memorize lines. There's no shortage of places to learn acting. TE4TN teaches the stuff that makes the whole show possible.