Archives: Series

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.

Our new season brings a wide range of exciting writers presenting new, unpublished work-in-progress to an appreciative and sophisticated New York audience at Performance Space New York.  As part of our mission to build and grow literary community we will present some of our best known and most rewarded writers, along with terrific artists whose work is under-recognized, along with emerging writers with auspicious debuts, and some who have not yet published. See your favorites and discover new voices in a community setting with an appreciative and sophisticated audience.

Highlights include living legends Carmen Maria Machado,  Keeanga Yamhatta-Taylor, Casey Plett, Julia Glass, Thomas Glave, AM Homes, and Pulitzer prize winners Jayne Anne Philips and Benjamin Moser*. From London Sci-Fi Master Rivers Solomon, Exciting mid-career writers Elif Batuman, Betty Shamieh, Luis Jaramillo, Aaron Robertson, and Ricardo Montez on John Rechy, Michael Waters on Debt, Juan Martinez, Owen Park, Alvin Eng, Shelly Marlow, Maura Finkelstein on the truth about Hillel,  and help the legendary Robert Gluck celebrate his 80^th birthday.

*Confirmation pending

2026/2027 Schedule:

This season at Performance Space New York, we continue to listen to our artists’ evolving questions instead of searching for fixed answers—we open up artists’ processes to our community, provide space for work to develop in private, and invite a broader performance ecosystem into our spaces to share resources, and collaborate. Across commissions, presentations, and community partnerships, artists perform, improvise, host conversations, gather community, and test new ideas as they fuse and embrace nonlinearity beyond form, genre, and medium.

Fall 2026 at Performance Space New York opens up with our 2026/2027 OPEN ROOM resident, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, who transforms our lobby/community space into Cavernous Shoal–a listening room with a bespoke sound system and a sculpture composed of mangrove roots that assemble a temporary ecology opening on Saturday, September 19th. Across the year-long programming, this sound system made specifically for this occasion splits the space open through experimental listening sessions, co-hosted open decks and pairings of underground sonic artists. Swiss global network and science consulate SWISSNEX (Sept. 22nd-25th), returns to Performance Space New York and activates our space as a site of global climate activism for three days of communal climate thinking and action.

October brings a new performance series at Performance Space New York, HOUSE PARTY, where the spirit of house parties is used to instigate more spontaneous, responsive, immediate, less formal programming that inspires togetherness through shared experiences. For our inaugural House Party, Dauan Jacari presents “Yes, And…” (Oct. 23rd) where the garment designer and dancer collapses the boundaries between fashion, dance and performance for one night only. Tania Willard and Dana Claxton curate a new performance Playing Safe: Queering the Indigenous Performance Archive (Nov. 5th-7th) by Vance Wright, a curatorial fellow at grunt gallery, an artist-run centre, founded in 1984 on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Queer|Art (Nov. 20th-22nd) celebrates its 15th anniversary with a multidisciplinary program, its inaugural publication, and a multi-day summit on community practices and the state of queer artistry in times of crisis. In collaboration with Queer|Art and across the season, we will co-host OFFICE HOURS–drop-in open hours with curators, administrators, producers, and technicians from NYC arts institutions, offering opportunities for artists and arts workers to meet, review portfolios, and build connections. Art Workers are Artists Too (Dec. 4th)–a program performed, run, and designed by technicians, designers, front of house, and other art workers who work at Performance Space New York returns. This year, the 6th edition of AWAAT extends into Performance Space New York’s annual holiday party.

In Winter 2027, we will present a new work with experimental theater, dance, and performance festival, Under the Radar (January 2027), alongside co-creative directors Janet Wong and Jenn Kidwell. New York based visual and dance artist, Malcolm-x Betts, leads, participates in, and organizes a two-week residency with a cohort of invited artists through a curatorial framework called Chain Reaction (Jan. 25th-Feb. 6th), inspired by Betts’ curiosities around labor, silent rage, and improvisational dance. Our 2025-2027 Keith Haring Curatorial Fellow Janggo Mahmud’s PERFORMANCE GIRL NEW YORK (Feb. 26th-March 12th) considers how a community is formed around objects, specifically those on offer from a fictional cosmetics company. Audience and consumer, converted via social media, are one and the same.

In Spring/Summer 2027, Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, better known as the brilliant minds behind the larger-than-life puppets of Poncili Creación, stage a new work Montaña De Raiz (March 10th-12th). For the first time the brothers will be collaborating with their father, Juan Del Hierro, for this three-night run. Sonic/visual artist and composer Jules Gimbrone‘s multi-channel audio installation and composition Dark Fringe (April 29th-June 1st) is the ongoing research of an extended dialogue with astrophysicist Max Isi. Composed of five sculptural sound instruments, Dark Fringe, builds on Gimbrone’s development around what he calls Trans-Sensing modalities–situating these sculptural sound instruments as trans-sensors that invite patterns of undoing and remaking. Choreographer and movement artist, Symara Sarai, will continue their developmental residency (May 10th-15th) ahead of an upcoming U.S. premiere at Performance Space New York. Closing out our 2026/2027 season, Nazareth Hassan’s EMOTES (June 24th-26th) is a new work and theatrical meditation on dance and movement as it moves between analog and digital worlds, morphing through the algorithms into entirely new practices.

Anchoring our season are recurring programs Open Movement and First Mondays as well as an experimental new position, an Access Residency. Sunday afternoons from noon to four, participants of all ages and abilities are invited to participate via dance, documentation, observation—or any way they choose in Monica Mirabile’s Open Movement, where simply sharing the space becomes a means of connection and self-discovery. At 4pm, we shift into weekly workshops and participatory practices, guided by artists and members of our extended community. Sarah Schulman’s monthly First Mondays brings veteran and novice writers together to share works in progress, with a special celebration this year to honor Robert Gluck’s 80th birthday. The Access Residency at Performance Space New York involves a New York City-based artist / access worker to creatively explore access at the intersection of various departments—production, audience services, and front of house—for two large-scale commissions.

Lastly, occupying a special place in our program will be a memorial for Charles Dennis (October 3rd, 2026), one of the founding forces of P.S. 122, the organization now known as Performance Space New York. The way Charles and his fellow artists led P.S. 122 deeply shaped who we are and remains central to our DNA and mission. The event will celebrate Charles’s life, spirit, and the worlds he helped make possible.

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.