WHAT WE DO
THE OFFICE performing arts + film is comprised of a small, dedicated group of senior staff, lead by founder Rachel Chanoff, who has 35 years of experience working in the arts in New York, and a dynamic (and growing) team of creative producers and curators. Our work encompasses producing, programming, and consulting. We specialize in helping artists we love to realize their creative vision, in working with institutions and organizations to develop and curate performing arts programs that illuminate their mission, and in dreaming up, planning, and pulling off unique, extended, multi-venue and multi-disciplinary events.
PRODUCING
THE OFFICE works as a creative producer to develop and support new work by artists whose vision and artistry we are deeply compelled by, such as Carrie Mae Weems, William Kentridge, Theater of War, Rithy Panh, and Angelique Kidjo. We become the engine room for these projects, shepherding them often from the early stages of creative inspiration through developmental workshops, fundraising and commissioning, tour planning, and on to world premieres and beyond. We have brought projects to the stages of major festivals and venues around the world, from the Sydney Opera House to the 2010 Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver; the Dublin International Theatre Festival to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town; the Tate Modern and the Southbank Centre in London to the Chaktomuk in Phnom Penh; Royce Hall and the Ace Theater in Los Angeles to BAM, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and the Park Avenue Armory at home in NYC. Our producing work also encompasses large-scale site specific public art projects, like The Mile Long Opera on the Highline in NYC and Triumphs and Laments on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, and unique festivals like the annual FreshGrass Festival and the 3-week long opening of the REACH at the Kennedy Center. We also produce galas, benefits, and other events for all manner of organizations both inside and outside the culture sector.
PROGRAMMING
THE OFFICE provides ongoing artistic curation for a group of extraordinary venues, festivals, and presenting organizations. Our programming work with these partners is driven by our understanding that the artists and projects they put on their stages and screens tell the story of who they are. Programming is how you communicate to your audience your values and priorities; we are deeply attuned to this narrative, and sensitive to the challenges and opportunities inherent in it. We currently program the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, the performing arts and film at MASS MoCA, the FreshGrass Bluegrass and Roots Music Festival, the Margaret Mead Documentary Film Festival, the New York Jewish Film Festival, and the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College. Other current and recent programming engagements include the Kennedy Center, Symphony Space, Carnegie Hall, and the American Museum of Natural History. We also provide interim programming solutions for venues in need of anything from a single show to an entire season. Our experience extends across all performance disciplines including music, theater, dance, spoken word and beyond, as well as to film and digital media. Each year on average, events we program and/or produce are seen by a total audience of over 325,000.
CONSULTING
THE OFFICE has an enormous well of experience in professional arts development, gained through working in and with organizations in music, dance, film, theater, and across the arts, as well as in commercial settings outside the cultural sector. We put this experience to use in developing strategies for cultural initiatives of every incarnation for venues, institutions, municipalities, and corporate clients. Many of these engagements become ongoing relationships after the initial project is completed. Consulting clients past and present include MASS MoCA, Williams College, Arts Brookfield, the AMNH, and the Kennedy Center, among many others. While we’re versed in the language of arts consulting, our strength lies in the fact that we actively engage in the business of producing, programming, planning, and administering the arts at the highest level. We specialize in working with new institutions to help think through what their cultural platform will look like. An example of this is NYU Abu Dhabi, with whom we entered into a multi-year project to create a strategic business, artistic and operational plan for its yet-to-be-built Arts Center. This effort, shaped by the university’s need to reimagine what an arts center in this region could be, included writing the Arts Center’s mission, vision and values statement, designing its artistic program, and overseeing an executive search.
CONVENING
The visceral and intellectual thrill of experiencing art lies at the heart of our work—the reason we program and produce events to make those moments of joy, inspiration, contemplation, and challenge possible for audiences. We also value the conversations around art and culture that interrogate the meaning of this work, and to that end we frequently organize and produce gatherings aimed and fostering this kind of dialogue. These can be anything from a one-day event in NYC to launch Critical Minded, a granting and learning initiative that supports cultural critics of color in the United States; to the weekend-long For Freedoms 2020 Congress in Los Angeles, which aimed to build a collective artists’ platform for public action and to create plans to supercharge civic engagement in their communities leading up to 2020’s Presidential Election; to the week-long Rolex Mentor and Protégé Salon in Cape Town, a hybrid retreat/showcase where artists met to discuss and share work during the day and engaged with public audiences in the evenings. Facilitating these kinds of convenings now, as the culture sector grapples with the upheaval of the global pandemic and begins to reimagine itself in a future where the arts and their relation to society has dramatically shifted, feels especially crucial.