Pop-Up Event Director

Pop-Up Event Director — Awkward Portrait Studio (Seasonal, Holiday 2026)

Awkward Family Photos is bringing its portrait studio into shopping malls for the holidays. Guests step into a set built like Grandma's living room, put on the silliest outfits we could find, and take the most over-serious family portrait of their lives. It's a comedy brand with a lot of heart, and as it turns out people love it.

We're hiring a Pop-Up Event Director to run one location for the season.

Locations: 

Capital Mall — Olympia, WA 

Broward Mall — Plantation, FL 

Franklin Park Mall — Toledo, OH 

Southlake Mall — Merrillville, IN 

Yorktown Center — Lombard, IL

️ Season: November 6th, 2026 through December 24th, 2026, plus training beforehand

⏱️ Schedule: Full-time seasonal, including weekends and evenings 

You are the person who makes the location work. On any given day, that means:

• Opening and closing the booth, and owning the standard of everything in between
• Leading a small crew — booth attendants and photographers — including assisting in training any new team members over the season
• Being the mall's point of contact: their management, their security team, their rules
• Receiving the supplies, checking every item against the packing list, and getting it all packed and shipped back at the end of the season
• Handling the things nobody else should have to: an unhappy guest, an equipment failure 
• Reporting daily numbers and flagging problems early enough that we can fix them

You will not handle cash or card payments — guests pay on their own phones —but you will manage the inventory of the location. 

• Supervisory experience in retail, events, hospitality, or anything else where you ran a floor and a team at pace
• Genuinely calm when it gets busy. Holiday mall traffic is relentless, and the job is mostly about keeping a small team steady through it
• Comfortable being the adult in the room on safety and consent matters, including saying no to a paying customer
• Available across the whole season, weekends and holidays included — this is the one period we cannot flex
• Reliable communicator. If something breaks at 6 pm on a Saturday, we need to hear it from you at 6 pm on a Saturday

Nice to have, not required: experience with pop-up retail or seasonal photo operations, a driver's license, prior experience training staff.

You don't need to be a photographer. You don't need to know anything about cameras. We have photographers; we need someone to run the place.

Send a résumé and a short note — a few sentences is fine — telling us about a time you ran something busy and it went well, or ran something busy and it didn't, and what you did about it. Apply here: Pop-Up Event Director application

We hire from all backgrounds and experiences, and we'd rather hear from you than not if you're reading this and wondering whether you're a fit.

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.