Click here to download an interview with Artistic Director Kristin Marting, about the history and future of HERE Arts Center, from www.wps1.org.

Since 1993, HERE has been one of New York's most prolific producing organizations, and today, it stands at the forefront of the city's presenters of daring new hybrid art. HERE supports multidisciplinary work that does not fit into a conventional programming agenda. Our aesthetic represents the independent, the innovative, and the experimental: HERE has developed such acclaimed works as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues;  Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique; Hazelle Goodman's On Edge; Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers; and original musical and dance works created and directed by HERE Co-Founder and Artistic Director Kristin Marting.

The New York Times has called HERE “one of the most unusual arts spaces in New York and possibly the model for the cutting-edge arts spaces of tomorrow.” Indeed, HERE has become successful at creating a new kind of arts enterprise—the collaborative multiarts center. In 13 years, we've supported over 11,100 artists and attracted over 850,000 arts patrons. We aim to integrate art into daily life and engage our community's needs and interests on as many different levels as possible in order to ensure our regular presence in their lives.

HERE supports the work of artists at all stages in their careers through fully-produced works, commissions and subsidized performance and rehearsal space. In addition, HERE's staff provides marketing, technical and administrative support. All work at HERE is curated based on the strength and uniqueness of the artist's vision.

Over the last 13 years, HERE and the work presented HERE have garnered 10 OBIE awards, an OBIE grant for artistic achievement, a 2006 Edward Booth Award (“for Outstanding Contribution to NY Theatre”) from the CUNY Graduate Center, three Drama Desk nominations, two Berrilla Kerr Awards, two NY Innovative Theatre Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. We believe that our multidisciplinary approach is the way to engage the audiences of tomorrow, ensuring a healthy and productive future for the performing arts field at large.

HERE's core annual audience consists of approximately 50,000 ethnically diverse, urban 20-30 something's—an audience base that many in the field attempt to engage. We produce work that is affordable , challenging and alternative—offering our audiences the opportunity to feel that they are part of something new and fresh. Key elements of our performance programming are designed to allow the public to have as many access points to the development of original art as possible through work-in-progress showings, workshop productions, postshow artist talkbacks, informal discussions in our café and full productions.

 

above photo: Carl Skutsch 

Founded by four artists in 1993, our mission supports artists’ independence within an interdependent community. This community provides the artist with access, arts management innovation, and nonprofit enterprise. We measure our overall success by the lively, active exchange that occurs in our spaces daily. We cultivate adaptability in order to best respond to the needs of our community.

Kristin Marting is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of HERE and has constructed 24 hybrid works for the stage (10 original works, 8 adaptations of novels and 7 classic plays). For the last 15 years, she has been developing a unique hybrid directorial / choreographic form that features a "gestural vocabulary" used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element.  Her work has been supported by the NEA, NYSCA, DCA, Aeroflex Foundation, Axe-Houghton Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Multi Arts Program and Peg Santvoord Foundation; reviews have appeared in all major New York media.  She co-founded Tiny Mythic Theatre Company in 1988 and HERE Arts Center in 1993.  As Artistic Director of HERE she cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces for an annual audience of 45,000.  Under her leadership, HERE has received eleven OBIE-awards, one Pulitzer Prize nomination, and two Drama Desk nominations.  She has lectured and been a guest artist at Bard, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, NYU and Williams.  She regularly serves on grant panels for TCG, DCA and NYSCA, among others.

Read more about Kristin and HERE:

American Theatre Dec 06

 

Kim Whitener has just joined the HERE Arts Center as Producing Director, working in partnership with Artistic Director Kristin Marting.  HERE supports the work of artists at all stages in their careers through fully-produced works, commissions and subsidized performance and rehearsal space.

Since 2001, Ms. Whitener has been an independent producer with her own company, KiWi Productions, working with a diverse range of US artists, both companies and individuals, in the contemporary theater, dance-theater, and multi-media worlds to develop and produce new projects, working with co-producers worldwide.  Her current projects include Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights remount and The Builders Association (Alladeen, Super Vision and the upcoming new work Continuous City), and she is involved in developing several other projects in both theater and film/media.  Previous clients have included Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, 33 Fainting Spells, and The Actor’s Gang, among others.  Ms. Whitener was consulting producer on Logic of the Birds, artist Shirin Neshat’s live performance featuring singer Sussan Deyhim (Lincoln Center Festival, Walker Art Center, Artangel London) in 2001.  She also was the co-producer of Zero Church, a multi-artist concert/performance event by Suzzy and Maggie Roche, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in April 2002.

Ms. Whitener was Managing Director of the ensemble theater company The Wooster Group for over four years until Summer 2001, responsible for all marketing, communication, and tour outreach/producing.  Prior to that she served as Marketing Director for Playwrights Horizons for three years (1994-96), with a concentration on developing new audiences for new work in development.

She has served on the NYSCA Individual Artists Panel, the LMCC Swing Space Panel, and the Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant Panel administered by Arts Presenters, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Prior to coming to New York in 1994, Ms. Whitener held several arts administration and producing positions, including Associate Director of Development at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, and General Manager/Co-Producer of the C. Walsh Theatre/Boston Music Theatre Project at Suffolk University in Boston.  She also has extensive experience in teaching seminars nationally and internationally on production, management and development of projects for global touring, most recently at the Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University, in The Netherlands, to participants from Western and Eastern Europe, and former SSRs, emphasizing international partnerships in production, touring and funding issues.