The New York biennial for visual art performance — founded 2005 by RoseLee Goldberg as the first biennial dedicated to commissioning new performance work, and the institutional reference point for the form across twenty years and eleven editions.
The Lead Essay Twenty years and eleven editions
When RoseLee Goldberg founded Performa in 2005, the institutional argument was that performance art deserved the commissioning infrastructure other contemporary art forms had long enjoyed. Twenty years on, that argument has won — and the Tate, MoMA, the Whitney, and the major contemporary kunsthalles all now commission performance at scale that would have been unthinkable before Performa.
Performa was founded in 2005 by RoseLee Goldberg, the South African–born performance art historian whose 1979 book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present had been the field's foundational survey for a quarter-century. Goldberg's structural argument for the biennial was that the international biennial form had, by 2005, become the principal institutional infrastructure for contemporary visual art — and that performance art, despite its century-long history within the visual art tradition (from the Futurists and Dada through Fluxus, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović, and the 1970s feminist performance generation), did not have an equivalent infrastructure. Performance was treated as a contemporary visual art form, but commissioned, programmed, and presented as the contemporary visual art form's poor relation. Performa was conceived as the structural correction: a biennial whose central premise was the commission of new performance work by visual artists.
The 1st Performa — Performa 05 — opened in November 2005 across more than fifty venues in New York. The biennial's distinctive structural premise has held across all eleven editions: each Performa commissions a small number of major new "Performa Commissions" — new performance works by visual artists who often have no significant prior performance practice — alongside a wider programme of presented work. The commissioned-work model has produced major works by, among many others, Mike Kelley, Francesco Vezzoli, Jesper Just, Tarek Atoui, Yael Bartana, Wangechi Mutu, and Yuko Mohri. The Mike Kelley Day Is Done commission at Performa 05 established the institutional model: a major American conceptual artist who had not been principally known as a performance artist before Performa produced a new performance work whose continuing institutional reading in the post-2005 international art conversation is significant.
Performa's institutional argument — that performance deserves to be commissioned at scale, not merely programmed — has reshaped how performance is treated by visual art institutions internationally. The post-2005 international institutional turn toward performance commissioning at the major contemporary art museums traces to Performa's founding institutional argument: the Tate Modern Turbine Hall performance programming, the MoMA performance programme under Klaus Biesenbach, the Whitney performance commissioning, the Pompidou performance programme, the post-2010 international kunsthalle performance commissioning — all of these reflect the Performa-inaugurated institutional argument that performance is a contemporary visual art form deserving of commissioning infrastructure.
Performa has now run eleven editions across twenty years: Performa 05 (2005), 07, 09, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21 (held outdoors across New York in October 2021 in response to the pandemic), 23, and Performa 25 (November 2025). Performa 25 — the twentieth-anniversary edition — opened in November 2025 with a programme of commissions across Manhattan and Brooklyn venues including the Performa Hub at 80WSE Gallery, Roulette Intermedium, NYU Skirball, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and partner institutions across the city. The 9th Performa (2019) was the most internationally-programmed of the pre-pandemic editions; Performa 21 was the all-outdoors pandemic-era edition that confirmed the institution's resilience; and Performa 25 reaffirms the institution's continuing position as the reference point for the international performance-commissioning conversation.
The continuing institutional question is what comes after Goldberg. Goldberg has founded and continuously directed Performa for twenty years; she is institutionally synonymous with the institution. The post-Goldberg institutional architecture — whatever it becomes — will test whether the Performa institutional argument depends on the Goldberg-as-director continuing institutional position, or whether the institutional argument has become enough to sustain itself under different directorship. The subsequent decade of Performa's institutional history will answer that question.
Performa is operated by the non-profit cultural organisation Performa, founded by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004 and anchored in New York. Continuing institutional support comes from the Performa philanthropic and patronage network, corporate-philanthropic partners, the New York State Council on the Arts, and individual patron support. Performa operates the biennial alongside a continuing year-round programme of performance commissions, archive projects (the Performa Hub), and the Performa Institute educational programme.
A Second Reading What the Performa Commission produced and what it didn't
The Performa Commission's distinctive institutional method — commissioning new performance work by visual artists who often have no significant prior performance practice — is institutionally productive, and the structural question worth developing is what the method produces and what it does not.
What the Performa Commission method produces is new performance work at visual-art institutional scale that the pre-Performa performance institutional infrastructure could not have produced. The visual-artist-commissioned-to-perform model brings the visual-art institutional resources (commissioning budgets, exhibition-quality production values, international art-press attention, venue infrastructure) to the performance form. The outcome has been performance work that has entered the contemporary art canon — the Mike Kelley Day Is Done, the Francesco Vezzoli Performa commissions, the Yael Bartana Performa work, the Wangechi Mutu commission — at institutional scale that the pre-Performa performance form had not previously achieved.
What the Performa Commission method does not produce — and what the post-2010 critical literature on Performa has registered — is commissioning of career performance artists whose work constitutes the content of the performance form as a continuing artistic practice. performance artists whose entire career has been performance — figures including the 1970s feminist performance generation, the Black Mountain College performance lineage, the international performance art generation that pre-dated Performa — have been under-represented in the Performa Commission programme relative to visual artists who turn to performance through the Performa institutional invitation. The visual-artist-commissioned-to-perform model centres the visual-art institutional reading of performance over the content of the performance form as a continuing artistic practice.
Neither reading is wrong. The Performa institutional argument was that the visual-art institutional infrastructure should extend to performance — and the commissioning method is the institutional consequence of that argument. The structural question is whether the post-2005 institutional transformation that Performa produced — the visual-art institutional commissioning of performance at scale — has benefited the performance art conversation, or absorbed the performance form into the visual-art institutional architecture in ways that the performance art conversation had institutional reasons to resist. Both are true; the ongoing institutional negotiation between them is the continuing structural question of the post-2005 international performance conversation.
The Institutional Spine
Five episodes across twenty years.
The first Performa opened in November 2005 across more than fifty New York venues. Performa 05 established the biennial's distinctive commission-led structure and the model of commissioning major new performance work from visual artists with little prior performance practice — a model that has held across all eleven editions and reshaped institutional commissioning of performance internationally.
Sources: Performa archive; Goldberg, Performance Now
The Mike Kelley Day Is Done commission at Performa 05 established the institutional model: a major American conceptual artist who had not been principally known as a performance artist before Performa produced a new performance work whose continuing institutional reading in the post-2005 international art conversation is significant.
Sources: Performa archive; post-2005 international art-press coverage
Performa 09 marked the centenary of the 1909 publication of the Futurist Manifesto with a programme of new commissions explicitly engaging the Futurist performance tradition — a foundational reference for the field, and the subject of Goldberg's 1979 history. The edition consolidated Performa's institutional argument and its commissioning model.
Sources: Performa archive; Artforum, Frieze coverage
Performa 21 (12–31 October 2021) was held entirely outdoors across New York City in response to Covid-19 — the ninth edition of the biennial and, for the first time in the institution's history, free to the public. New commissions by Kevin Beasley, Ericka Beckman, Sara Cwynar, Madeline Hollander, Tschabalala Self, Shikeith, Danielle Dean, and Andrés Jaque confirmed the institutional resilience of the Performa model under pandemic-era conditions.
Sources: Performa archive; Art Newspaper, Artnet 2021 coverage
Performa 25 — the biennial's 11th edition and twentieth-anniversary season — ran across Manhattan and Brooklyn in November 2025, with commissions and presentations at the Performa Hub and partner institutions across the city, including eight new commissions.
Sources: Performa archive; Performa 25 programme
People in the Biennial
Founder & Director
South African–born American art historian, curator, and writer. Author of Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979) — the foundational survey of the performance art field — and of Performance Now (2018). Founder and continuing director of Performa since 2004. The institutional architect of the biennial dedicated to commissioning performance, and the institutional figure whose continuing directorship has anchored Performa across its twenty-year history.
Source: Wikipedia
Performa Commission · multiple editions
American artist (1954–2012). The Day Is Done (2005) Performa commission was among the form-defining works of Performa's first edition. Continuing institutional influence on the post-2005 generation of visual artists who treat performance as a primary medium. The Kelley Foundation continues to maintain the post-2012 institutional position of Kelley's work within the international contemporary art conversation.
Source: Wikipedia
Continuing performance art reference
Yugoslav-born Serbian performance artist (b. 1946). Performance practice dating to the early 1970s; the field's most internationally visible figure. Long association with Performa as both commissioned artist and continuing public reference for the form Performa was founded to institutionalise. The Abramović Method Performa-era engagement constitutes one of the continuing institutional references of the post-2005 international performance conversation.
Source: Wikipedia
Performa Commission · post-2005 generation
The post-2005 international generation of Performa-commissioned artists whose performance work constitutes the continuing institutional record of the Performa Commission model. The Vezzoli, Bartana, Mutu, and Mohri commissions each extended the Performa institutional argument into new performance territory across the 2007–2025 institutional period.
Source: Performa archive
Performa Hub · institutional partner
The 80 Washington Square East Gallery at New York University, continuing institutional partner of Performa since the founding 2005 edition. The Performa Hub at 80WSE constitutes the continuing institutional anchor venue for the biennial-period programming, including archive presentations, education programming, and visitor-information infrastructure.
Source: 80WSE Gallery
Organising institution
Non-profit cultural organisation founded by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004 to produce the Performa biennial and a year-round programme of performance commissions, archive projects (the Performa Hub), and the Performa Institute educational programme. Headquartered in New York. Continuing institutional support from private and corporate philanthropic partners, the New York State Council on the Arts, and individual patrons.
Source: performa-arts.org
Geography
Performa Hub at 80WSE Gallery
NYU partner venue · biennial-period anchor
Roulette Intermedium
Brooklyn performance partner
NYU Skirball Center
Major commission venue
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Site-specific commission venue
Each Performa biennial activates venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn. Consult the official Performa guide for current programme dates and venues.
For the Visitor
How a city-wide, commission-driven biennial works in practice — dates, programme, tickets, and arriving in New York.
Performa is held in odd-numbered years, across roughly three weeks of November, in New York City. Every edition since the founding Performa 05 has followed the same autumn arc; the most recent edition, Performa 25, opened in November 2025 as the twentieth-anniversary, eleventh edition.
The next edition is expected in November 2027, on the established biennial cadence. Dates, the artistic frame, and the commission list are typically announced by Performa several months in advance; the full schedule is published at performa-arts.org.
Performa is unlike most international biennials in that it has no fixed exhibition site. Each edition is a three-week programme of newly commissioned performance works and partner-presented events distributed across the city — Manhattan and Brooklyn principally, with occasional excursions to Queens, the Bronx, and outdoor public sites. Past editions have activated MoMA, MoMA PS1, the Whitney, the Kitchen, BAM, Roulette Intermedium, NYU Skirball, Times Square, Performance Space New York, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and many smaller galleries and theatres.
Each edition designates a Performa Hub — an anchor venue that operates as the meeting point, the information desk, and the home of the biennial's free-entry programming (talks, screenings, the Performa Institute education programme). The Hub location moves from edition to edition. For Performa 25 the Hub was anchored at 80WSE Gallery, NYU's partner space at 80 Washington Square East.
Most Performa commissions are individually ticketed, with prices set by Performa and its partner venues edition by edition. A portion of the programme — Performa Hub talks, public-site interventions, and certain outdoor commissions — runs as free entry; Performa 21, the pandemic-era edition, was held entirely outdoors and free to the public.
Tickets for individual events are sold through performa-arts.org and, in some cases, directly through the host venue's own box office. Recent editions have also offered a festival pass covering multiple ticketed events; current pass formats are listed on the Performa site each edition.
By air — three international airports serve the city: John F. Kennedy (JFK) in Queens, LaGuardia (LGA) in Queens, and Newark Liberty (EWR) in New Jersey. The AirTrain JFK and AirTrain Newark connect to the subway and NJ Transit respectively; LaGuardia is served by buses and ride-share.
Getting around — the New York City Subway is the practical way to move between Performa venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn. Pay with a contactless card or phone using OMNY (tap-to-pay), or use a MetroCard. The geographic spread across the boroughs is part of Performa's institutional model — plan an evening around one or two performances rather than expecting to walk between venues.
Because Performa has no fixed site, the planning rhythm is unlike a museum-anchored biennial. The starting point is the full programme, published by Performa several months ahead of each edition: visitors choose individual commissions and events, book tickets ahead, and build the trip around the programme rather than around opening hours of a single venue.
Most ticketed commissions are scheduled in the evenings, with talks, screenings, and Hub programming running through the day. The opening days carry the densest programme traffic and the most-discussed premieres; the middle weeks tend to be the practical sweet spot for an unhurried visit. Allowing three to five days in New York is the working rule for visitors who want to see a meaningful cross-section of the commission list alongside Hub programming.
New York's accommodation market is one of the deepest in the world; for Performa, the practical question is proximity to Lower Manhattan, the East Village, the West Village, and the partner venues in Brooklyn (Fort Greene, downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg). Visitors who want short subway rides to the Hub and the principal partner venues tend to base themselves in Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, or near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
Performa does not operate accommodation or maintain a hotel partner list; the NYC official tourism agency, NYC Tourism + Conventions, publishes a public directory of properties across the five boroughs.
Practical details framed from Performa's published institutional model across eleven editions (2005–2025) and the Performa 25 programme. Dates, venues, pass formats, and the Performa Hub location for the next edition will be confirmed when Performa publishes the 2027 programme.
From the Directory
The commissioning record
At the heart of Performa's work is its commissioning programme, which provides substantial financial and production support to artists creating ambitious new performance pieces over a twelve-to-twenty-four-month process. These commissions have produced some of the most discussed performance works of the twenty-first century; many have gone on to tour internationally and enter major museum collections.
Performa 11 · November 2011
A twelve-hour durational performance in which a small opera company — soloists, chorus and chamber orchestra — repeated the closing scene of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro continuously across the day at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side. The work made Kjartansson's reputation in North America and has been re-staged repeatedly since, most notably during his 2014 New Museum survey. It established the Kjartansson method: long-duration, music-and-image-driven, both ironic and earnest.
Sources: Performa archive · New Museum, Ragnar Kjartansson: Me, My Mother, My Father, and I documentation, 2014.
Performa 13 · November 2013
A reimagining of Amiri Baraka's 1964 play, staged in the Russian and Turkish Baths on 10th Street in the East Village. The choice of venue — a working bathhouse with its own racial and class history — placed Baraka's text of subway encounter and racial violence inside a literally enclosed, sweating space. The production marked one of the first major performance commissions for Johnson, a visual artist whose subsequent practice — film, installation, public sculpture — has continued to draw on the methods Performa underwrote.
Sources: Performa archive · The New York Times, performance coverage, November 2013.
Performa 15 · November 2015
A multimedia performance built around Huxtable's own poetry, vocal performance, projected imagery, and a chorus of collaborators. Huxtable's emergence around 2014–15 — her self-portraits had been shown in the New Museum Triennial that February — made her one of the most-discussed young artists in New York. The Performa 15 commission consolidated the institutional reading of her practice as a serious contribution to the contemporary performance field, not a single-medium phenomenon.
Sources: Performa archive · New Museum, 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, exhibition documentation.
Performa 17 · November 2017
A skateboard park installation at Coleman Skatepark on the Lower East Side, in which Kruger's signature Helvetica-on-red text declarations covered the bowl, the ramps, the steel rails, and the boards themselves — designed by Kruger and free to use. The work activated a public space already used by a non-art-world community and brought a body of viewers Performa rarely reaches into a direct, embodied encounter with Kruger's text-image practice. The boards became collectable; the bowl was repainted and reopened to public use after the biennial closed.
Sources: Performa archive · Artforum, Performa 17 coverage, November 2017.
Performa 09 · November 2009
An eight-part lecture-performance based on Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, staged at the New York Public Library and other venues in the run-up to Kentridge's Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich's opera of the same source. The work threaded together animated film, spoken essay, and the artist's own appearance on stage; it remains a reference for how the Performa commissioning process can underwrite forms that the rest of the contemporary art system cannot quite house.
Sources: Performa archive · Metropolitan Opera, Shostakovich The Nose production documentation, 2010.
Performa 11 · November 2011
A long-duration social-practice work — an active community space in Corona, Queens, founded with the Queens Museum and Creative Time and operating as both an artwork and a working immigrant-services organisation. The Performa 11 commission underwrote the public unveiling and the structural conversation around it. The project ran for several years afterwards under Bruguera's direction and has since become one of the touchstones for the durational, civic-infrastructure mode of socially engaged practice.
Sources: Performa archive · Queens Museum, IMI project documentation, 2011–2015.
Edition history
Performa's biennial editions have run from November 2005 onward, with each edition built around a historical reference point that organises the year's commissioning programme. This is the brief edition-by-edition record.
Founding edition. November 2005, across more than fifty New York venues. Marina Abramović's Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim — seven nights of re-performance of historic performance works, including pieces by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Gina Pane and Valie Export — and Mike Kelley's Day Is Done were the institutional landmarks.
Second edition. November 2007. The edition expanded international participation and consolidated the commissioning programme as the biennial's structural mechanism for producing new work.
Centenary of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. The edition was organised around the Futurist performance tradition — the foundational reference of Goldberg's 1979 history — with reconstructions and contemporary responses, including William Kentridge's I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine.
Fourth edition. Major commissions included Ragnar Kjartansson's Bliss and Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International. The Performa Institute was launched the same year for year-round research and education programming.
Fifth edition. The edition introduced the concept of national "pavilions without walls" — partnerships with national cultural institutions outside the fixed-pavilion model — and included Rashid Johnson's Dutchman in the Russian and Turkish Baths.
Tenth-anniversary edition. Expanded historical programming and a new global partnerships framework; major commissions included Juliana Huxtable's There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed.
Seventh edition, organised around the centenary of Dada (1916–17). Major commissions included Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Skate) at Coleman Skatepark.
Eighth edition, organised around the centenary of the Bauhaus (1919), including reimaginings of Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet and other Bauhaus-stage references.
Ninth edition, held entirely outdoors across New York City as a pandemic-era adaptation (12–31 October 2021) and free to the public for the first time. New commissions by Kevin Beasley, Ericka Beckman, Sara Cwynar, Madeline Hollander, Tschabalala Self, Shikeith, Danielle Dean and Andrés Jaque.
Tenth edition. The edition addressed ecological crisis and technological mediation; the digital infrastructure built up during the pandemic edition was extended into hybrid presentation across venues.
Eleventh edition and twentieth-anniversary season. November 2025, across Manhattan and Brooklyn, with eight new commissions at the Performa Hub and partner institutions.
Essential Reading
The foundational survey of the performance art field, and the institutional document on which Performa's founding argument depends. Begin here.
Goldberg's continuation of the 1979 survey into the post-Performa institutional period.
The continuing institutional record of eleven editions of commissioned performance.
The Performa 05 commission whose continuing institutional reading anchors the post-2005 international performance conversation.
The MoMA retrospective whose institutional reading extends the Performa-era performance commissioning argument.
The standard reference for the biennial form against which Performa's commission-led model defines itself.
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