Our Mission

Studio 42 is a not-for-profit production company that supports emerging artists of all disciplines, with a focus on producing innovative and adventurous theater. Other disciplines of development, production, and promotion include music, film, fine art, choreography and dance, design, and writing.

Studio 42 seeks to foster and cultivate new works of audacity and risk: works that keep up with our fast-paced, technological society and respond to it with warmth and imagination. The company engages the artistic sensibility of downtown New York City with every venture, and continually builds platforms from which burgeoning creators are encouraged to spring.

Since the company’s launch in 2001, Studio 42 has produced an extensive roster of full-length plays and workshop productions. Studio 42 has also produced several developmental workshops and created various alternative performance series, including Studio Sessions, a regular multi-disciplinary showcase of emerging talent; Trials and Errors, an open forum for artists to showcase new work most recently produced at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; and its latest, UNPRODUCIBLE!, a series of fully-produced theatrical events in which Studio 42 takes an “unproducible” script and makes it a reality… for one night only.

Studio 42 also launched the Starving Artists Ball in 2002, as a fundraiser, a multi-disciplinary exhibition and a celebration of emerging artists, to widespread acclaim. This semi-annual event is consistently attended by up to 800 of New York City’s up-and-coming artists, along with many of its established philanthropic art supporters. In support of its mission, Studio 42 established the Starving Artist Award Fund in 2003, and has since presented five Starving Artist Awards as cash prizes to emerging artists of NYC across a variety of disciplines.

Currently, the company is expanding its UNPRODUCIBLE! series. Such plays are those in which the cast size, subject matter, potential depravity, complexity of staging, or scale of spectacle take them out of consideration for most other companies. They are extreme, outrageous, unusually bold and surpass the boundaries of convention. The belief is that the right combination of these qualities—especially when coupled with a dose of satire, allegory or fantasy—make up what’s most transporting, stimulating and surprising about theater.

Studio 42 is a proud member of A.R.T./NY and Fractured Atlas and is honored to receive support from hundreds of dedicated supporters, including the Nancy Quinn Fund and the Susan Stein Shiva Foundation. Studio 42 has been featured in American Theater Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, New York Magazine, Gotham Magazine, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, The New York Sun, The Daily News, Show Business Weekly, SHOUT Magazine, NYTheater.com, Playbill.com, Backstage.com, TheaterMania.com, On & Off, HX, New York 1, and NPR, among others.