NEW YORK CITY: The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) has announced programming for JanArtsNYC, an annual collection of public performances and industry gatherings in January 2026. Kicking off on Jan. 3, JanArtsNYC centers around the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’s APAP|NYC Conference (Jan. 9-13), aiming to leverage global audiences drawn to NYC and to highlight the city’s performing arts community.
“We are so proud to once again present JanArtsNYC, a collection of best-in-class live performance events taking place this January throughout our beloved city,” said Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment commissioner Pat Swinney Kaufman in a statement. “For 13 years, JanArtsNYC has helped position January as ‘Performing Arts Month’ in NYC, where the world’s best come annually to premiere a vast unfolding of the newest works in theatre, dance, opera, music and performance.”
This year, MOME and APAP will present a short film that celebrates the coalition of its JanArtsNYC festivals, convenings, and events, produced by filmmaker AJ Wilhelm and Jenny Thomas. Theatre events include the Out-Front! Festival (Jan. 3-11), Under the Radar Festival (Jan. 7-25), PROTOTYPE (Jan. 7-18), and PhysFest (Jan. 8-18). Other events include Live Artery|New York Live Arts (Jan. 7-17) led by Bill T. Jones, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Congress and Unity Festival (Jan. 7-9), NYC Winter Jazzfest (Jan. 8-13), the Works & Process Underground Uptown Dance Festival (Jan. 9-13), globalFEST (Jan. 11), and the ISPA (Jan. 13-15) conference.
The Out-Front! Festival will center LGBTQ+ and feminist emerging voices. According to artistic director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Out-Front! was created to be a “high-visibility platform for radical choreographers and performing artists whose rigorous, playful, and fabulously outrageous creative practices speak to our community in new, unexpected, and beautiful ways.”
Beth Morrison Project’s annual PROTOTYPE festival presents contemporary, multidisciplinary opera/theatre and musical theatre works, including black box experiences, larger chamber opera productions, concerts, and more. This year’s slate includes a 20th anniversary project, the BMP: SONGBOOK, two world premieres, NYC premieres of two BMP productions, “and some phenomenal collaborations both new and old,” said Morrison in a statement.
The Under the Radar Festival, the United States’ premier festival of experimental theatre and performance art, has been bringing bold, risk-taking work to NYC for over two decades, celebrating groundbreaking theatre and performance from around the world and just down the street. Founder and festival director Mark Russell described JanArtsNYC as a time when “New York becomes Festival City.”
“That JanArtsNYC can happen during this challenging time for the arts is a New Year’s miracle,” Russell said in a statement. “If you are a true New Yorker, you will be seeing a JanArtsNYC event in January, because that is the New York City we need.”
The community-led festival PhysFestNYC, located at Stella Adler Center for the Arts, will aim to celebrate, enrich, and envision the field of physical theatre. It provides space for physical theatre practitioners and audiences, with 10 days of back-to-back presented works, workshops, and community-building events.
In a statement, co-executive producer Becky Baumwoll said PhysFestNYC “aims to un-silo the movement-based makers that inspire our city year-round, yet often fall outside of the boundaries of typical theatre or dance forms. It is a remarkable thing to witness Bill Irwin doing a hat trick in one theatre, and down the hall see Chrybaby Cozie do the same hat trick in his Litefeet performance. What does this tell us about clown and street dance? About traditional forms in contemporary spaces? About the timelessness of physical spectacle?”
The annual APAP|NYC Conference convenes artists, agents, managers, producers, presenters and more from across North America and beyond, with showcases, networking, strategy sessions, and the world’s largest EXPO of its kind.
