Staff & Board

Paula Bennett was most recently the Manager of Foundations and Government for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut. She joined the Performance Space New York staff in July 2016. Paula is also a theatre director and librettist. When she’s not raising money for the arts or working on a project, she can be found leading fitness classes and other fun community activities at the Bedford Stuyvesant YMCA.

Taja Cheek is a Brooklyn-born curator and musician based in New York City.

Currently, Cheek is a guest curator for the 2024 Whitney Biennial and the Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, a radical interdisciplinary performance institution in the East Village, founded in 1980 as PS122. Prior to Performance Space, Cheek was BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn’s inaugural Artist Curator and also worked as a Performance Curator at Luna Luna. She led performance programs at MoMA PS1, including Warm Up, a summer outdoor music series that the museum has hosted in its courtyard since 1998, and Sunday Sessions, an interdisciplinary performance series. Throughout her six year tenure at MoMA PS1, she championed the creation of new performance works and co-founded an annual music festival and record fair celebrating the legacy of the beloved, now defunct, music store Other Music. In addition, Cheek worked closely with artists for many years and in various capacities to realize projects at institutions including Creative Time, The High Line, and Weeksville Heritage Center. In 2017, she co-founded a DIY rehearsal and performance space in her neighborhood in Brooklyn that primarily supports experimental music and performance.

In addition to her curatorial and programming work, Cheek is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who frequently records and performs under the name L’Rain.

Before joining Performance Space New York in 2018 as Deputy Director, Pati Hertling, our current Director, was a curator and art lawyer who organized various independent curatorial projects, including a Evas Arche und der Feminist, a salon series in Berlin and New York from 2005 until 2010 which combined visual artists with performance artists, three group exhibitions in New York, at the Chelsea Art Museum, White Columns, and the Swiss Institute, various other curated evenings combining food, performance and readings, she also is the editor, together with Negar Azimi, of an online epistolary archive called Deadlines and Divine Distractions and she is also the co-founder of Material Vodka, a vodka company with the mission to establish alternative funding mechanisms for art.

Originally from Vermont, Alex Reeves is digital designer and technologist who has been working with Performance Space for over a decade. In his freelance interactive design work, he has collaborated with artists including Blonde Redhead, Timbaland and Wale and has created work at Lincoln Center, the 02 Center and Pioneer Works. Vani.sh & Moonpool.co

Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda is our Associate Director. Her main interests lay in the intersection between art and social justice, with an emphasis on the empowerment and inclusion of underrepresented communities in the cultural sector. Initially, a journalist, Ana Bé has 10 years of experience in cultural production and arts management between Puerto Rico and New York.

Bio coming soon