Supporting New York City’s robust, innovative, & inspiring vital, exhilarating, & dynamic unique, uplifting, & risk-taking performing arts community.

The Tank, Puffy Hair. Photo by Sammy Tunis.

Dance Theatre of Harlem. Photo by Rachel Neville.

Ma-Yi Theater Company, Teenage Dick at The Public Theater. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Howard Gilman believed in the power of the arts to transform lives. In honoring his legacy, the Foundation provides funding and support to New York City-based performing arts organizations that are reflective of our City’s vibrant cultural community.

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Providing flexible and reliable support to those creating and stewarding artistic experiences

Every arts organization has unique needs. To meet those needs, we provide general operating support that grantees can count on, even when everything else is up in the air. We also provide responsive and focused support for challenges and opportunities that sometimes come along.

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Ragas Live Festival 2020

Hair & Other Stories

eat me!

Virtual Birdland

Brooklyn Raga Massive

This live set was filmed at the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room in the Rubin Museum of Art. Ragas Live Festival 2020 was presented by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Raga Massive, NYC Radio Live and the Rubin Museum of Art. This was the 22nd of 24, hour long sets which broadcast from 15 cities around the world.

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Urban Bush Women

Hair & Other Stories is a dance-theater work that explores race, identity, and ideas of beauty through the lens of Black women’s hair. It reflects on what constitutes freedom, liberation, and release in our everyday struggles to rise to our Extra-ordinary Selves in extraordinary times. This is the urgent dialogue of the 21st Century.

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Soho Rep

Inspired by an Ecuadorian ritual of preparing and eating “guaguas de pan” or bread babies, as a way to mourn those we’ve lost, this short film is both a release and a rebirth. It’s an examination of the relationship between creation and destruction, a return to a creative process, and a move beyond comfort zones towards a celebration of self-love. Created as apart of Soho Rep’s Project Number One.

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Afro Latin Jazz Alliance

Recorded remotely from locations around the world, Arturo O’Farrill and the mighty Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra continued their Sunday night Birdland residency in an online setting. In this video, they paid tribute to the groundbreaking composer Carla Bley – and presented the virtual world premiere of a new Bley composition, “BluePalestine,” that was commissioned specifically for Arturo O’Farrill and the ALJO. In addition, there are guest appearances by Karen Mantler, Renee Manning and Patricia Brennan, and a special archival segment featuring Carla Bley herself, which was originally shown as part of ALJA’s“Notes For Votes” campaign, back in October 2020.

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We affirm the intrinsic and implicit value of the arts. We believe that art—in and of itself—is integral to our humanity. We embrace art’s indisputable social, cultural, and political outcomes. We know art is a vehicle for change, as well as a source of beauty, joy, and truth.

Laura Aden, President & CEO
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