The 2025/2026 season at Performance Space New York examines our city through the lens of artists that live elsewhere in the country and world, but have family, friends, community and deep memories here. We expand our history of provocation with an array of artists who tear through the walls of medium, standardization, and perception. Below, you’ll find a sample of what’s to come, but, by design, our season will continue to grow and evolve. Through community partnerships throughout the year, we commit to responding to the wants and needs of the artists, art workers, organizers, activists, audience members, staff, and others in our immediate community as we find hope, resistance, and common-ground in diaspora, education, conversation, partying, and shared communal space. Stay up to date with our season and any developments on Instagram, subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, or feel free stop by our space at any time.
 
Julio Torres debuts his Off-Broadway show synthesizing stand-up, design, and dream logic into a whimsical odyssey of color, emotion, and identity. In collaboration with The Kitchen, which will host the installation, Performance Space New York presents the long-awaited New York premiere of Will Rawls’ performance, . Presented in collaboration with the 2026 Crossing the Line Festival – the work uses dance, stop-motion, sound, dialogue, and improvisation to probe the compromised space between visibility and invisibility in which Black performers often find themselves. Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés detach their bodies from daily reality by applying the Chopped and Screwed technique from hip hop music to movement language in DARKMATTER.
 
A NYC premiere from Lucy Liyou asks when does transitioning end and if shame can be as illuminating as empowerment through humor-filled, drag-inspired, Korean folk opera. On the heels of the 10th year anniversary, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane makes poetry a communal and sensorial experience, inviting the audience into a performance drawing on Mexican street culture and the communal ritual of drinking horchatas. Leslie Cuyjet, during a season-long residency with Performance Space New York, will further research and develop her project For All Your Life, examining ideas of cultural and institutional legibility and how to value a life’s worth, seeding new vehicles of performance. Mandy Harris Williams presents Critique Cabaret, a performative lecture combining critical theory, cabaret performance, live music, and audience interaction.
 
Jazmin Jones and Olivia M. Ross (as part of sim-B) invite a collective of Black queer archivists to design an accessible system of preservation and encryption, making personal and communal archivation a liberatory practice. Mindy Seu presents a live podcast series, in collaboration with Deem Journal, examining the relationship between technology and the body, and uplifting the pioneering contributions of sex workers to contemporary society.  We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers uses the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War to instigate global conversations around censorship and recontextualize the Western image of Vietnam through four debut intergenerational, multilingual performances supported by long-term residencies, conversations, and provocations in Performance Space New York’s theaters over the course of a month. This program is co-organized with Anh Vo, Lumi Tan, and maura nguyễn donohue.
 
Forge Projects has been invited into Open Room for a year-long installation offering a place for respite and re-education focused on Indigenous and decolonial studies. Alternative Education, organized by Performance Space New York’s Production Manager Sarai Frazier, offers workshops, tech camps, fairs, and events designed to uplift and empower artists, technicians, curators, and art workers. Sarah Schulman organizes our recurring monthly program, First Monday’s, where writers of generations new and old preview their work, devoid of censorship. Monica Mirabile, curator of Performance Space New York’s Open Movement program every Sunday, encourages movement of all backgrounds and experiences to embrace simplicity and impulse-based practice.