Long before she built software for performers, Nuoya Li was one, chasing callbacks after her day job and paying for lessons in an industry that rarely explains where the money goes. That double life is the real origin story of PerformaMatch.
On a given evening, she might close her laptop after a day spent moving between product roadmaps and stakeholder meetings, change out of her work clothes, and walk into a rehearsal room to run a number with the people she is performing and producing alongside. Since last June, that has meant helping stage three ballroom dance shows connected to Fred Astaire, work she does not watch from the side but takes part in directly. For more than five years, that has been the rhythm of her life: technologist by day, performer by every evening and weekend she could carve out.
Most people who eventually build software for an industry study it from the outside. Nuoya Li, founder and CEO of PerformaMatch, did not have that luxury, or that distance. She spent years inside the performing arts world, absorbing its unwritten rules the way only someone auditioning, rehearsing, and waiting on callbacks can, while holding down a demanding career in technology at the same time. That vantage point is where PerformaMatch, the casting platform she founded, actually begins. Not in a slide deck. In her own schedule.
The System That Was Supposed to Help
Early in her time as a performer, Nuoya did what most artists are told to do if they want real opportunities: she signed on to train with a modeling agency. What she got in return became a lesson she has carried into everything she has built since. The fees kept arriving. The path they were supposedly buying never became any clearer. She could not tell what her money was actually funding, or whether any of it was moving her closer to the roles she wanted. The talent she had brought into the arrangement was never in question. The honesty of the system around it was.
“I just remember being told that everyone in New York City goes to the same three photographers to get their headshots done. I was stupefied. I thought that was crazy.”
That early disappointment did not sour her on the industry. It sharpened her focus. Over the following years, she watched the same pattern repeat around her, not as a rare bad experience but as something close to the default. Performers without an agent were left to comb through generic listings that made no distinction between a classically trained dancer and a stand-up comedian, applying into a void and hoping something landed. Talent, she came to believe, was never really the scarce resource in this industry. Being found was.
A Second Education, Running in Parallel
While she was living that reality on stages and in audition rooms, Nuoya was also building an entirely different set of skills. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master’s from Columbia, and went on to build a career in product management, analytics, and enterprise transformation consulting, the kind of work that trains a person to look at a broken process and ask what would actually fix it, not just what would paper over it. On paper, that resume and her life backstage barely intersect. In practice, she was quietly collecting the exact toolkit she would eventually need to fix the industry that had once left her paying fees with no clear path forward.
The two halves of her career ran less in sequence than in parallel, each shaping how she understood the other. Her years in the arts taught her what performers actually need and what they are quietly denied. Her years in technology taught her how to build for it. PerformaMatch is what happens when those two educations finally meet.
Building the Advocate She Once Needed
What she built is less a job board than a working assistant, one designed to do for performers what an agent might, minus the fees and the opacity that once frustrated her. Developed by Forest Friends Innovation Studio, the platform automates the tedious mechanics of applying, so performers spend less time retyping the same details into another form and more time preparing. It studies a performer’s type, range, and craft to surface auditions that genuinely fit, rather than burying them in generic listings. And it offers guidance for the audition itself, the kind of coaching most early-career artists have never had access to. The team describes the idea simply, as a personal agent in every performer’s pocket.
None of this reads, to Nuoya, as an abstract mission. It reads as a personal debt being repaid. She has said plainly that she did not set out to disrupt an industry for its own sake. She set out to fix the specific friction she had lived through herself, the sense that plenty of talent was going unseen for reasons that had nothing to do with ability.
A Tale of Two Professions
Nuoya has not stepped back from the arts to build this company. If anything, the opposite is true. The same rehearsal rooms and productions that first showed her the industry’s blind spots are still part of her week, which means PerformaMatch is not being designed from memory. It is being designed by someone who is, quite literally, still in the room.
That closeness is, in the end, the most personal thing about the company she has built. PerformaMatch was not modeled on a market opportunity she noticed from a distance. It was modeled on her own unanswered questions as a performer, questions she is now trying to answer for everyone who comes after her, one better-matched audition at a time.
About PerformaMatch
PerformaMatch is a data-driven, intelligent casting and opportunity-matching platform for performing artists, connecting actors, dancers, singers, and multidisciplinary performers with the roles and opportunities that fit them. Built on the belief that talent should be discovered on merit, the platform’s mission is to create an equitable casting field for every artist. PerformaMatch was incubated by Forest Friends Innovation Studio.
