Archives: Series

We the Youth: Keith Haring Lecture Series for Kids is one of Performance Space New York’s recurring programs designed for children and families. This series invites cultural luminaries to explore ideas and social issues often left outside traditional school curricula—serving as a springboard for intergenerational dialogue that sparks curiosity, awareness, and critical imagination among the next generation.

This series is supported by The Keith Haring Foundation in honor of Keith Haring who collaborated with young people throughout his life and believed in art’s ability to create a more accepting society.
 

Through community partnerships across 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.

Community Space

OPEN ROOM
September 20, 2025 – June 24, 2026
Tuesday – Friday, Sunday | 12 – 6pm

Forge Project transforms our community space, OPEN ROOM, as a part of a year-long installation and residency, offering visitors a place for respite, exchange, and contemplation. Centering Indigenous place-based knowledges, creative practice, and critical engagement through reading lists, video works, workshops, performance and discussion-based activations open to the public throughout the residency period, the space will also host closed door convenings facilitated by and for Native people.
 
This season, Forge Project will house the following programs:

Organized and curated by Sarah Schulman, First Mondays prioritizes one of the great advantages of living in New York City: hearing new ideas as they are being created, long before they are published and on the shelves.

For five years, this free event has given audiences access to our most exciting established and emerging writers as they present new, unpublished work-in-progress. In a relaxed atmosphere, a vibrant community is being built as audience members, often writers and artists themselves, return every month to deepen their knowledge of contemporary literature as it is being born.

This year’s First Mondays features dynamic new work from playwrights, composers, novelists, poets, critics, biographers, scholars, memoirists, performance artists and beyond with well loved writers such as Mary Gaitskill, Marlon James, Dennis Cooper (author of THEM from PS122 1973), provocative adventures in new forms with David Velasco, Phoebe Legere, M Lamar, contemporary stand-outs like Parul Seghal, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Danzy Senna, debut work from Bobuq Sayed, Matthew Rodriguez, and the chance to hear emerging voices that everyone should know like Julian Delgado Lopera, Grace Cho, Cheryl Tan, Sa’ed Atshan, and George Abraham plus much, much, more.

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, [siccer]. 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.