Harlem Stage Announces New Artistic Director and CEO

Harlem Stage has announced producer, director, scholar, and arts and cultural executive Dr. Indira Etwaroo as its new Artistic Director and CEO. The organization made the announcement last night to a wide-ranging, star-studded crowd of supporters assembled for Harlem Stage’s 40th anniversary sold out gala. Succeeding longtime Artistic Director and CEO Patricia Cruz, who led Harlem Stage to a place of thrivability after 25 years of innovative and inspiring leadership, Dr. Etwaroo will write the next chapter of an institution that challenges inequity and exclusion in the arts, modeling the profound cultural importance of spaces where artists of color and thought-leaders can create work expressing urgent truths. Her career has followed a trajectory of imagining and reimagining iconic arts organizations as artists, technology and global audiences migrate and evolve. 

In Dr. Etwaroo, Harlem Stage has found an ideal leader to chart and realize its future—a bold leader with an intuitive ear for all voices, creating multi-platform spaces and original content that represent the diversity of the globe, and urging cultural institutions towards equity and sustainability. For Harlem Stage, Dr. Etwaroo's vision is one of growth—of seeking innovative means of telling Harlem Stage's story farther and wider, and ensuring that the world-class artistry nurtured and presented by the organization is experienced by bigger—and, activates—a broader public. Dr. Etwaroo’s approach surrounds three intersecting pillars: equity, democracy, and technology. "Harlem is our home, but the world is our stage" has become her north star as she's prepared to step into the position, with an emphasis on expanding the bridges between the local and international that have always been central to Harlem Stage's ethos. The organization's new leader sees Harlem Stage—as a thriving cultural center—as uniquely able to address and dismantle the systems that have historically kept institutions run by people of color and for artists of color under-resourced. Sharing its model with a larger public is critical to this work. 

Dr. Etwaroo's vision is one of expansion—of seeking meaningful, complex, and innovative ways of telling Harlem Stage's story farther and wider, and ensuring that the world-class artistry nurtured and presented by the organization is experienced on limitless—live and virtual—stages. Dr. Etwaroo believes deeply in the fundamental right of creative artistic expression driven by authentic intersections between equity, democracy, and technology. "Harlem is our home, but the world is our stage" is what she has made her north star as she's prepared to step into the position, with an emphasis on expanding the bridges between the local and international that have been central to Harlem Stage's ethos. The organization's new leader sees Harlem Stage—as a radical sociocultural laboratory—as uniquely poised to inspire world class art rooted in new technologies and innovations by artists of color and to address and challenge the longstanding systems that have historically kept institutions run by people of color and for artists and audiences of color under-resourced. Sharing its model with a larger public to advance the field is critical to this work. 

Dr. Etwaroo comes to Harlem Stage from the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple in Cupertino, California, where she served as the first-ever Director of the theater, driving the venue’s strategy for all global partnerships and live events  and developing original multiplatform content rooted in Apple’s values. Previously, she served as Executive Artistic Director of the Off-Broadway Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, awarded the 2021 Presidential Medal of the Arts during her last year as its executive leader. She led the theater through radical growth, more than doubling the audience, increasing revenue by 212%, and producing groundbreaking content including numerous timely, award-winning plays rooted in social justice themes in Brooklyn, online and with cultural partners across the nation and produced the first Black Lives Matter mural in New York, transforming the street mural into a live and online performance that she directed, as the first Equity-approved live event in the nation during COVID with Wendell Pierce and Daniel Bernard Roumain, among others, to call out police brutality. Dr. Etwaroo also helmed the launch of The Black Seed, a groundbreaking initiative, and fundraised over $10 million of support for Black theaters throughout the U.S. during COVID, and worked with the Chadwick Boseman Estate as the first executive advisor to shape its Foundational work.

Dr. Etwaroo has been a major force for content innovation and inclusion in the public media field, as the Founding Executive Producer of The Greene Space in NYC, where she reimagined the largest—almost century-old—public radio station and conceptualized the first-of-its kind multiplatform space to bring live, on-air and online video content to audiences across the world. She was also Founding Executive Producer and Director of NPR Presents, the global live events platform. At these spaces, Dr. Etwaroo coalesced a fertile space for distinguished and emerging artists of color to create and perform together and introduce new work with ever-expanding audience reach and artistic growth. Notably, she Executive Produced the American Broadcast Premiere of the 75th Anniversary of Zora Neal’s Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Phylicia Rashad, and the first-ever audio recordings and video broadcasts of August Wilson’s entire American Century Cycle, in partnership with the August Wilson Estate and Artistic Directors Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Stephen McKinley Henderson. 

Courtney F. Lee-Mitchell, Board President of Harlem Stage, said, “I am so thrilled to welcome Indira to Harlem Stage! Her longtime devotion to the arts and artists of color has been exemplary, and we are all excited to work with her to expand upon Pat's legacy and Harlem Stage's mission to celebrate Harlem, its artists, and artists of color from around the world.”

“I have lived my life governed by values of artistry, democracy, and equity. I am profoundly humbled to have the opportunity to work in a place with the rich legacy that is Harlem and to lead the internationally influential New York cultural institution that is Harlem Stage, a beacon of the values that I hold dear,” shared Dr. Indira Etwaroo at Harlem Stage's gala. “It is not lost on me that my leadership tenure begins at a time when we must face—head on—the fragility of our fractured democracy, challenge demagoguery and the normalization of blatant falsehoods, and demand that cultural institutions be thought of as first responders and artists as frontline workers in this quest to create a more just, more truthful, more inclusive and more equitable world for the next generation and for generations to come. I am deeply committed to the work ahead.”

Harlem Stage’s appointment of a new Artistic Director and CEO is part of its five-year strategic plan (FY21-25), and takes place at a peak in its 40-year history of impact. As performing arts institutions worldwide have reduced their programming, Harlem Stage has reaffirmed its role as an indispensable platform for ever-evolving artists of color, and just concluded one of its most robust seasons to date, with works by Camille A. Brown, Bill T. Jones, nora chipaumire, Stew, Craig Harris, Vijay Iyer, Tamar-kali, Jason Moran and Abdullah Ibrahim, and Ambrose Akinmusire, to name a few. Harlem Stage has raised over $17 million in its Campaign for Harlem Stage, a $25 million fundraising initiative, co-chaired by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Lupita Nyong’o, and Wendell Pierce, to secure the institution’s long-term future and expand on its work. The funds will underwrite the development of fearless and risk-taking new work with world-class artists through Harlem Stage’s long standing WaterWorks commissioning program; the growth of the institution’s presenting work shared with audiences around the corner and around the world; the expansion of its education, humanities and community engagement work; and strategic investments in technology and its facilities.

At last night’s gala at City Winery, Harlem Stage celebrated outgoing Artistic Director and CEO Patricia Cruz’s quarter-century tenure and also conferred the Transformative Artist Award to 2024 Tony Award nominee, dancer, choreographer, and educator Camille A. Brown; the first Patricia Cruz Medallion Award to longtime Board member, publisher, producer, former longtime head of DC Comics and MAD Magazine, and partner of Double Nickel Entertainment Jenette Kahn; and Harlem Stage’s annual Philanthropy Award to BET/Jeanine Liburd. The event featured performances from Hannah Lemmons aka LEMMONS; Michela Marino Lerman with Students from The Wadleigh School; Mireya Ramos; Vernon Reid; and Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director Carl Hancock Rux, and was attended by many leading lights in Harlem Stage’s multigenerational community of artists, including Ronald K. Alexander, Ronald K. Brown, Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy, Craig Harris, Bill T. Jones, LaChanze, Kenny Leon, Tania León, Jonathan McCrory, Estelle Parsons, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Elizabeth Streb, Henry Threadgill, Tamara Tunie, Kathleen and Henry Chalfant, and more.

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