How a technology leader with years of deep involvement in the performing arts turned her frustration with a broken casting system into PerformaMatch: an intelligent casting platform built for the artists the industry tends to overlook.
For more than five years, PerformaMatch founder Nuoya Li immersed herself in the performing arts, an involvement she sustained alongside a demanding career in technology. That vantage point taught her something most people in either world never see firsthand: that for performers, the talent was never the hard part. The hard part was the search. Between auditions, day jobs, and the endless scroll through casting boards that all seemed to blur together, she watched skilled, hungry artists lose opportunities not because they lacked ability, but because the system was never designed to find them.
That hard-won perspective became the seed of a company. PerformaMatch, developed by Forest Friends Innovation Studio, is an intelligent casting platform built on a simple premise: a performer’s next role should not depend on who they happen to know or how many hours they spend refreshing a job board.
A Problem She Knew From the Inside
The traditional casting world tends to reward two things: representation and proximity. Performers with agents get fed opportunities. Those without representation, the majority of working artists early in their careers, are left to find roles on their own, sifting through generic listings that treat a classically trained dancer the same as a stand-up comedian. For unrepresented talent, the process is less a marketplace than a maze.
She had felt the friction herself. Early in her involvement, she signed on to train with a modeling agency, expecting a clear path toward real opportunities. What she found instead was a system that was expensive and frustratingly opaque: fees that kept adding up, little transparency about where the money went or what it was actually buying, and no honest line of sight into which doors, if any, the investment would open. The talent was there. The clarity was not.
That experience crystallized something she would see again and again: how much energy artists pour into simply being seen, and how often the systems built to help them serve their own opacity instead. The conventional tools, casting boards and directories that have existed largely unchanged for years, ask the performer to do all the work. They search, they filter, they apply, and they hope. The matching, such as it is, happens by luck.
PerformaMatch was designed to invert that dynamic. Rather than asking performers to dig through listings, the platform is built to bring the right opportunities to them, an approach the team describes as putting a personal agent in every performer’s pocket. The distinction matters. A job board waits to be searched. An agent works on the performer’s behalf.
Two Careers, One Mission
Building a company to serve performers might look, from the outside, like a leap. For Nuoya, it was less a leap than a convergence. Her connection to the arts was never a passing interest; it ran deep and lasted years, giving her a vantage point that most technology founders never have. That commitment has remained active to the present: since last June, she has helped stage three ballroom dance shows with Fred Astaire, performing and producing alongside fellow artists rather than watching from the sidelines. She was building for a community she belonged to, solving a problem she had personally absorbed.
The other half of her story is technology. A graduate of Brown University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, and Columbia University, where she completed a master’s, Nuoya has built a career in product management, analytics, and enterprise transformation consulting, learning how complex systems get untangled, how data turns ambiguity into decisions, and how to design products that meet people where they are. It is an unusual combination: an operator fluent in the language of building software at scale who is also, at heart, an artist fluent in the language of casting calls and the realities performers face.
PerformaMatch sits at the intersection of those two lives. The empathy comes from her years in the arts; the execution comes from the years spent shipping products and reshaping how organizations work. Her ambition is to point that hard-won technical experience back toward the community she has long been part of, using modern product and analytics tools to give fellow performing artists the kind of advocate the industry has never built for them.
That lived experience shapes how PerformaMatch approaches its product. The platform leans on personalization rather than volume, aiming to understand what kind of performer someone actually is, including their type, their range, and their craft, and to surface roles that genuinely fit. Where legacy platforms ask artists to translate themselves into keywords, PerformaMatch is designed to do that interpretive work intelligently, then explain why a given role surfaced. The goal is not simply more listings, but better-matched ones.
It is a philosophy that reflects its origins. Nuoya did not set out to disrupt an industry in the abstract. She set out to fix the specific, daily friction she and her peers had felt for years: the sense that talent was abundant and access was not.
What PerformaMatch Actually Does
If legacy casting boards are passive directories, PerformaMatch is designed to behave more like a working assistant. Three capabilities sit at the center of that idea.
The first is automating the application workflow. Submitting for roles is notoriously repetitive: the same headshots, the same reel, the same details, retyped across submission after submission. PerformaMatch is built to streamline that grind, helping performers assemble and tailor their materials and move through applications with far less manual effort, so their energy goes toward preparing rather than paperwork.
The second is data-driven recommendations. Rather than leaving performers to comb through every open call, the platform is designed to surface upcoming auditions that fit a given artist’s profile, drawing on what it understands about their type, range, and craft. The aim is relevance over volume: a smaller, smarter set of opportunities worth pursuing, each with a clear sense of why it surfaced.
The third is preparation. Finding the right audition is only half the battle; walking in ready is the other half. PerformaMatch is built to offer personalized, role-aware guidance, including audition tips and craft-focused pointers, so that performers can approach each opportunity with more confidence and context. It is the kind of support an attentive coach or representative might offer, made accessible to artists who have never had either.
Taken together, these capabilities reflect the platform’s guiding idea: a personal agent in every performer’s pocket that finds, prepares, and applies alongside the artist, rather than waiting to be searched.
Built for the Performers, the Industry Overlooks
PerformaMatch is aimed squarely at the working performer who has not yet been handed the keys: the early-career artists, often in major cities, who are serious about their craft but underserved by existing tools. For this group, the company argues, the difference between an idle directory and an attentive matching engine is not a convenience. It is the difference between a career that stalls and one that moves.
The platform is in active development, with a community-first approach that mirrors how performers actually find work and support one another: through networks, peers, and word of mouth rather than cold listings. That instinct, too, traces back to Nuoya’s own years in the field, where community was often the only thing standing between an artist and burnout.
What Comes Next
PerformaMatch is entering the market at a moment when intelligent technology is reshaping nearly every creative profession, often to the unease of the people inside them. The company’s wager is that the technology, pointed in the right direction, can do something the entertainment industry has long needed: widen the door rather than narrow it.
For a founder whose years in the arts left a lasting mark, the mission is personal. She is building the tool she once wished existed, and betting that thousands of performers need it too.
