HERE Arts Center


HERE Arts Center is a New York City-based off-off-Broadway presenting house, founded in 1993. Their location includes two stages specializing in hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media and puppetry in addition to art exhibition space and a cafe. Since 1993, HERE reports having supported over 14,000 artists and hosting approximately 1,000,000 audience members. HERE supports the work of artists at all stages in their careers through fully produced works, commissions and subsidized performance and rehearsal space.
They are located in Hudson Square, SoHo on 145 Avenue of the Americas, New York, between Spring Street and Broome Street. HERE prides itself on "producing theater that is affordable, challenging and alternative". In 2008 the space underwent extensive renovations which saw the venue take its current form.

HERE Story

Since 1993, HERE has served over 14,000 emerging to mid-career artists developing hybrid performance and work that does not fit into a conventional programming agenda. Examples include Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues; Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique; Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers; Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven; Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts; and Joey Arias & Basil Twist’s Arias with a Twist. Work produced and presented at HERE has garnered 13 OBIE awards, an OBIE grant for artistic achievement, a 2006 Edwin Booth Award from the CUNY Graduate Center, three Drama Desk nominations, two Berrilla Kerr Awards, four NY Innovative Theatre Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Recently, HERE received a $500,000 federal grant by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Artistic Director Kristin Marting picked up a 2005 BAX10 Award for Arts Managers. In 2005, HERE purchased its long-time home and completed a complete renovation in 2008, all through a five-year, $5 million “Secure HERE’s Future” campaign.
There are two theatres, a cafe/gallery, and support spaces.
Each season, HERE produces three to six works, which are developed over a one to three-year period through Resident Artist programs: the hybrid performance-based HARP and the puppetry-focused Dream Music. Programming for 2008-09 includes premieres by downtown legends Joey Arias and Basil Twist, director Mallory Catlett’s visceral war-song cabaret, choreographer Faye Driscoll’s dance memoir, composer Christina Campanella and playwright Stephanie Fleischmann’s installation-art song cycle, and more. They also feature work-in-progress showings by our Resident Artists in our annual CULTUREMART festival, in addition to regularly presenting the work of Visiting Artists.

HERE Artist Residency Program – HARP

HERE Arts Center offers every year a chance to emergent or already known artists to develop their project in a 3-5 year time. The selection takes place every January. HERE receives each year more than 100 applications for the HARP and chooses about 20 projects that match its interests and concerns. The new group meets every month, added to the old people and everybody discusses the projects, and giving advice.

About the HERE Theatres

January 2013 marked the launch of their PROTOTYPE Opera/Theater/Now festival which presents visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works by pioneering contemporary artists from around the world. The festival lasts for less than two weeks and works are staged at various venues around New York City. Festival promoters claim it's the only festival of its kind in the United States – presenting fully produced premieres, national and international presentations, and work-in-progress showings of original genre-bending works by both emerging and career artists from the contemporary classical opera-theatre and music-theatre idiom and focuses on innovative, mostly chamber-scale works.

Significant productions