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Artists in Residence

The Greene Space’s Artist in Residence program hands the mic to ambitious artists, curators and collectives in the New York metro area who are eager to connect with live audiences, creating something new together in real time.

See a list of our past Artists in Residence below and view their series archives.

Leadership support for The Greene Space’s Artist in Residence program is provided by the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. Additional support is provided in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the Howard Gilman Foundation.

Our artists in residence must…

    • Be based in the NYC metro area
    • Have new work to present that is aligned with our mission, our values and our editorial criteria
    • Be able to work with our resources.
    • New work can mean that you’ll be doing a Greene Space-commissioned work, a world premiere of work that you’re already undertaking, or just the first time the work will be presented in NYC.
    • For curators or performers, your proposed format should either be a series of three or more live events OR a festival/marathon/conference spanning one or more days.
    • For visual artists, you must be able to exhibit your work in our space for a period of no less than eight weeks.
    • Work must be compatible with the physical limitations of our venue (i.e. we can display photographs, we cannot display an enormous sculpture; we can present a trio, we cannot present an orchestra).
    • Lead time before the first event/exhibition proposed must be no less than three months from the time you submit a proposal.
    • We work with prospective artists-in-residence to hone proposals, support the creative development and pre-production of the work where desired and appropriate, provide a stipend in scale with the overall project budget, publicize the residency and promote the work and fully support the execution of all live shows or exhibitions in The Greene Space.

If you’d like to submit a residency proposal or find out more, email us at thegreenespace@nypublicradio.org.

Toshi Reagon

Credit: Photo by Erin O'Brien

TOSHI REAGON

Spring 2024

Toshi Reagon is a multi-faceted artist with a profound ear for sonic Americana who has made an unforgettable mark on the world of music, theater, and activism.

Reagon’s residency at The Greene Space, Now That We Are Here, envisions a world born from a fusion of music, storytelling, and conversation and illuminates the parallels between Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian terrain depicted in her Parable book series and the challenges we face. Channeling the spirit of Butler’s protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina and her Earthseed Belief System, Reagon empowers us to explore our control (agency) and independence (autonomy) in the face of technology, and harness the power of collective action within our communities to navigate the uncertainties ahead.

As a singer, composer, musician, curator, and producer, Reagon has showcased her immense talent through residencies at prestigious institutions such as Carnegie Hall and the Paris Opera House, as well as numerous festivals and venues worldwide.

In 2018, Reagon founded Wise Reagon Arts, a production company initially created to bring the opera “Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower ” to life. Co-created and composed by Reagon and singer, composer, scholar, producer, and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, this congregational opera draws inspiration from Butler’s novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Since its debut, the opera has traveled to three continents, captivating over 45,000 audience members. Reagon also developed the Parable Path, which fosters collaboration among artists, art presenters, community activists, and creators across various disciplines, and Songs of the Living, an initiative that builds community choirs and fosters collaborations with local artists and creatives across the globe.

Kia LaBeija

Credit: Photo by Taína Larot

KIA LABEIJA

Winter 2023

Kia Michelle Benbow, known professionally as Kia LaBeija, is an image maker and storyteller born and raised in the heart of New York City, Hell’s Kitchen. She composes theatrical autobiographical works ranging from photography, live performance, text based mediums, and film. She’s presented work at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Tate Modern, The Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of The City of New York, The Bronx Museum of the Arts,  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The International Center for Photography The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Performa ’19 Biennial.

Heavily involved in New York’s Iconic House and Ballroom scene for over a decade, Kia was a member of the Royal House of LaBeija from 2012 to 2019, serving as the Overall Mother from 2017 to 2019. She received a BA from the New School University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Fine Arts. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee alongside her partner Taína Larot.

Mash Up Americans

MASH-UP AMERICANS

Fall 2023

The Mash-Up Americans is your guide to hyphen-America. Since 2013, they’ve been navigating the complexities of mash-up identity as they cross multiple borders, ask all of the awkward questions, and figure out what it means to live expansive, authentic, impactful lives. Diverse heritage and the future of the great melting pot that is America lies at the heart of their podcast.

The media company and boutique creative studio founded by podcast hosts Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer present the “Ultimate Guide to a Mash-Up Life” which explores topics that surround people navigating multiple cultures and discuss what it means to be an American in today’s world.

About Amy S. Choi
Co-founder and Editorial Director of The Mash-Up Americans
A Korean-American married to a Colombian-Mexican-American, Amy is mom to two feisty Korombexican-Americans: in other words, The Future of America. She has worked for 20 years as a journalist and editor in New York and her work has appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Women’s Wear Daily, Inc., TED, Elle, and Teen Vogue, among other publications. She specializes in getting people to tell stories they never expected to share.

About Rebecca Lehrer
Co-founder and CEO of The Mash-Up Americans
Rebecca has spent 18+ years doing strategy, marketing, and audience development in media, arts, and culture (Director of BD at New York Public Radio, The Flea Theater, Headlands Center for the Arts, Righteous Persons Foundation) and has over 12 years experience in audio and podcasting. Her work focuses on the shared cultural experiences that bring people together and re-centering stories on voices you don’t usually hear.

The Civilians

Credit: Photo by Janice Yi

The Civilians

The Civilians, is a theater company dedicated to ambitious and exuberant new theater that creatively interrogates our lived experience; questions and tests the stories that shape our world; and awakens new thinking and perceptions. Its signature work is “investigative theater”—projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

Their performances showcase improvised scenes and music using AI-generated content, a theatrical event using archival WNYC recordings with experimental filmmakers and radical poets, and a one-of-a-kind performance bringing real stories of failure and flops to life through hilarious songs.

Piehole's Christmas Mountain

Credit: Photo provided by artist

Piehole Presents: Christmas Mountain

Winter 2022

Piehole’s Christmas Mountain is an interactive holiday story that rolls out in an “advent calendar” window display featuring animatronics, embedded videos, and original music on a handcrafted diorama.

Michael Mwenso

Credit: Photo provided by Artist

Michael Mwenso Loves You

Winter 2022

Bandleader and singer Michael Mwenso discusses Black music with Jon Batiste, examines the “nutritional value” of the music we consume, talks with legendary blues musician Bobby Rush, and performs with his troupe of global artists immigrating from each corner of the globe.

Toni Thai Sterrett

Credit: Photo provided by Artist

Toni Thai Sterrett

Fall 2022

Founder Toni Thai Sterrett and her NFT project, Bad Grrls Creative Club, explore, discuss, and showcase what it’s like to be a creative in this new world where the creator is queen!

Staceyann Chin

Credit: Photo provided by Artist

Staceyann Chin: Prodigyal: Home is where the Hurt/Heart/Hope is

Summer 2022

Staceyann Chin and friends present an interrogation of Kindred and Tribe and Belonging. Where is home? Will it always be the same place? When you leave, can you ever return? When it changes, how does it affect who you are, what you eat, who you call family?

The poet, actor, and performing artist is the author of the new poetry collection Crossfire: A Litany For Survival, the critically acclaimed memoir The Other Side of Paradise, cowriter and original performer in the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and author of the one-woman shows Hands Afire, Unspeakable Things, Border/Clash, and MotherStruck. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes, and her poetry been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She proudly identifies as Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, a woman, and a resident of New York City, as well as a Jamaican national.

Eunbi Kim

Credit: Photo provided by Artist

Eunbi Kim: It Feels Like

Spring 2022

Pianist and host Eunbi Kim presents It Feels Like, an interactive collage of personal inquiry, taking the audience on a truly creative adventure — the vivid journey of coming into one’s own.  Over four evenings, Kim and friends — cutting-edge musicians, writers, artists and more — share great music, delicious food, deep conversation, some good jokes and even better dance moves.

Angélica Negrón

Credit: Photo by Quique Cabanillas

El Living Room

El Living Room is a 4-part offbeat variety show imagined and orchestrated by Puerto Rican composer & performer Angélica Negrón and directed by Puerto Rican undisciplined artist Macha Colón. It’s a playful multimedia exploration of sound and story, of personal history and belonging. The show is a hybrid of funhouse, variety, Latin American morning TV, and late-night talk shows baptized in the waters of magical realism—the studio/set becomes a truly immersive musical landscape, blending the warmth and intimacy of your best friend’s living room with a whimsical, surrealist playground open for experimentation. Each week, “El Living Room” is activated by composers, performers, sound artists, comedians, and storytellers exchanging ideas with Angélica, delving into subjects both ordinary and complex, through the lens of humor and familiarity.

CATALYST

Catalyst Quartet

Winter 2021

Hailed by The New York Times as “invariably energetic and finely burnished… playing with earthy vigor,” the Grammy Award-winning Catalyst Quartet graced our stage in Winter 2021 with rare performances of work by five historically important Black composers, bringing to light these beautifully-crafted and — in some cases — heretofore never-recorded works. View series archive.

Punishment & Profit

Punishment & Profit

Winter/Spring 2021

Joe Biden made a campaign promise to end for-profit detention, and immediately after his election, two of the country’s largest private prison companies saw their stock prices collapse. Now the President has made good by signing an executive order, but changing the $80 billion business of mass incarceration will take so much more.

Over four thousand corporations are now invested in the imprisonment of 2.1 million people and the surveillance of another 4.4 million who are on probation or parole. They’re not always obvious; they include architects who design 6-by-8-foot cells for solitary confinement where people spend 23 hours a day, manufacturers that produce the shackles incarcerated mothers wear while giving birth, and consultants who run mock riots to train officers in combat.

In collaboration with Worth Rises and based on its comprehensive report, The Prison Industry: How it Started, How it Works, How it Harms, we’re gathering advocates, journalists, attorneys, and academics, leading with directly-impacted people, to talk about every aspect of the business of punishment, sector-by-sector, accounting for its myriad consequences today and exploring visions for a very different future. View series archive.

Credit: Photo by The Greene Space

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Wheat Paste Installation

Summer 2020

Visual artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh‘s collage portraits of Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Nina POP and Atatiana Jefferson appeared on The Greene Space’s facade at the corner of Charlton and Varick Streets in the summer of 2020.  See photos and artist’s statement here.

Imara Jones

Credit: Photo courtesy of Imara Jones

Lives at Stake with Imara Jones

Ongoing 2020

Lives at Stake is a series of frank conversations by and for trans people about the issues affecting their communities, hosted by Emmy and Peabody Award winner Imara Jones, The Greene Space’s first-ever Journalist-in-Residence. Building off Jones’ storytelling project TransLash, these online gatherings will also highlight the resilience, creativity and artistry that are critical ingredients to trans life, showcasing trans creatives performing their craft. View series archive.

Credit: Photo by Shervin Lainez

Bach’s Well-Tempered Lens with Jeremy Denk

Spring 2020

Pianist Jeremy Denk curated and performed in a series of events exploring J.S. Bach’s life and his most iconic work as artist-in-residence at The Greene Space.

A winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk drew audiences into the technical, musicological, cultural and philosophical elements involved in his own approach to this deeply personal work. He looked at how these timeless themes and shared aspects of the human experience can help to unite us in these divided times. View series archive.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the artist

Madison McFerrin’s Sissieretta Series

Fall/Winter 2019

Singer-songwriter Madison McFerrin joined us to present The Sissieretta Series, inspired by 19th century soprano Sissieretta Jones and her innovative productions that showcased her unique vocals and her friends’ talents. McFerrin convened local performers, artisans, creatives and vendors, specifically highlighting women of color. Each show was preceded by a happy hour featuring live DJ sets and artisanal crafts for sale. View series archive.

”That I am a mother. I want people to see that I am a mother.” – Tatiane

Credit: Photo by June Canedo

June Canedo: Focus on Your Breath

Spring 2019

Artist and curator June Canedo — whose photography of Roma star Yalitza Aparicio appeared in Vogue’s recent November issue — lead a conversation about authentic collaboration in art-making: artists, curators and subjects engaging as equal partners, with collective input on direction, process and intention. Her photography was also on display in The Greene Space. No series archive available.

 

Credit: Photo by Ali Smith

The Way We Live Now: Hilton Als and America’s Poets

Spring 2019

Writer and theater critic Hilton Als explored the ways poets and poetry reflect contemporary life, beginning his series in April 2019. Als put poets at the center of the conversation as it concerns America, its goals, aspirations, defeats and realities. Guests included Natalie Diaz, Michael Dickman, Michael R. Jackson, Saskia Hamilton and more. View series archive.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the artist

Radical Acts & Musial Deviancy with Arturo O’Farrill

Spring 2019

For four months beginning April 2019, six-time Grammy Award Winner Arturo O’Farrill held forth from his pianistic pulpit with the mission to be transcultural and genre-fluid and to embrace all persuasions of musical deviancy and fun. The Greene Space transformed into an arena for the new and the bold – for experiments in jazz, afrobeat, Latin fusion and those slippery compositions that escape our efforts to apply labels. View series archive.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the artist

Heartbreakers with Dessa

Spring 2017

Could our genes affect our romantic choices? Does love inhabit a particular region of the brain? If this song makes us too sad to drive straight, why are we playing it on repeat?

Rapper and essayist Dessa hosted her four-event series in The Greene Space in May 2017 – a collision of art, music and scientific research on love, sex and human adventures in pair-bonding. View series archive.

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