Archives: Series

Our Summer 2026 programming at Performance Space New York celebrates the exploratory power of process, recognizing the importance of artistic discovery through practice and play. With an emphasis on inventiveness and inquiry, we open our studios for invited artists, resource-sharing events, showcases of works-in-progress, and teach-ins supporting our expanding web of interdisciplinary artists. 

Weaving the threads of our international artistic tapestry, Paris-bred artist/producer/DJ, Christelle Oyiri (who DJs under the moniker CRYSTALLMESS) hosts and organizes the U.S. debut of EDGING at Performance Space New York, in conjunction with and in celebration of her first solo exhibition, Belief May Vary, at Amant. Oyiri’s EDGING is a performance and musical laboratory with DJ sets and live performances, a high energy collision of experimental electronics, regional club forms, rap, and techno, bringing dancers to a sonic edge.

Our 2025/2026 OPEN ROOM residents, Forge Project, close their year-long installation, a story, a river, a mirror, a map . Across the residency period, Forge Project has transformed our community space into a site for respite, contemplation, and community connection. (DATE TBD)

To celebrate our season closing on Saturday, June 27th, the return of Art Workers Are Artists Too – a program performed, run, and designed by technicians, designers, front of house, and other art workers who work at Performance Space New York. The program is a “thank you” to those who help shape the performances and events we present each season. Now in its 5th year, we invite performers to reflect on their time at Performance Space New York and share work that speaks to both sides of their practice—as artists and as art workers.

RECURRING PROGRAMS 

Our We The Youth – Keith Haring Lecture Series, which invites children and their friends and families to meet luminaries who talk about ideas and social issues that are often left off of school curriculums, returns on Saturday, June 6th, hosted and organized by artist and Ballroom icon, Kia Labeija. Kia’s lecture, titled Make Art, Cure AIDS, Eat Breakfast, will explore how art, text, and images can be used to start movements and inspire action. 

Open Movement, curated and organized by Monica Mirable, continues every Sunday in May with free workshops by Frank Leasing and Jo Shane, and a WIP FEEDBACK FRONT by Tess Dworman on May 17th. Open Movement for the 2025/2026 season concludes on June 7 with an open-mic of 5 minute works-in-progress featuring special showcases from a number of different artists across performance backgrounds!

RESIDENCIES

Across the summer, we invite artists to use our space for a deeper exploration of the artist process as a workshop for future projects. Throughout the month of July, artists Holland Andrews, yuniya edi kwon, and Symara Sarai will have full access to our studios. 

Following their performance earlier this season as part of by Will Rawls, Holland Andrews returns to PSNY with their collaborator, yuniya edi kwon, in preparation for a performance of How does it feel to look at nothing, an opera co-created and co-directed by the artists, exploring on the forces and conditions that compel life’s emergence and the meanings we make within periods of decay. Movement artist, Symara Sarai, will be using this time to examine their experiences of love as they are formed through risk, trust, memory, and cultural inheritance. Drawing from lived encounters and personal histories, their research considers how intimacy can manifest in unconventional, high-stakes, and spiritually resonant forms through dance, live action, and visual documentation. Their work reflects on love as a series of embodied negotiations shaped by vulnerability, autonomy, and relational exchange.

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.