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.

Appointed in 2018 Pati Hertling is our first Deputy Director. She serves as the primary mover with regard to major gifts, marketing and finance. She is a curator and art lawyer who has 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

Jenny Schlenzka was appointed Performance Space New York’s Executive Artistic Director​ in 2017​ and is the organization’s first female ​director. Prior to joining Performance Space, Schlenzka was the Associate Curator at MoMA PS1 in New York​,​ where she established​ Sunday Sessions,​ an interdisciplinary​,​ weekly live program. Sunday Sessions has featured hundreds of artists including Honey Di​j​on, Mette Ingvartsen, Ann Liv Young, Sondra Perry, Terre Thaemlitz, Justin Vivian Bond and Wu-Tang Clan, as well as new commissions by Hannah Black, Trajal Harrell, Ragnar Kjartansson, Mårten Spångberg, Anne Imhof, Matthew Lutz Kinoy and Tobias Madison. ​​In addition to her​ ​event program​, Schlenzka developed an interest in performance within the exhibition format, organizing the New York presentation of Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy (2014) and Anne Imhof: DEAL (2015)​. Between 2008 and 2012, Schlenzka was the Assistant Curator for Performance in the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art​.​ In 2012, she received the Yoko Ono Courage Award. ​She holds an MA in ​C​ultural ​Studies from Humboldt University, Berlin​.

Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda is currently the Head of Community Access and Inclusion at Performance Space New York. 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