When The Stage Is Brooklyn

David Binder wants to awaken new audiences to a 158-year-old outer-borough cultural institution.

- James Tarmy

When David Binder was asked to apply for the position of artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—a sprawling, three- theater arts complex with annual revenue of $50 million—he didn’t think he had a shot. “Who wouldn’t want it?” he says. But unlike colleagues up for the job, Binder hadn’t spent decades working in an arts institution.

Instead he’d worked as a producer of Broadway hits including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, organized the High Line festival (with David Bowie as curator), and guest-directed the London International Festival of Theatre.

But for a 158-year-old institution with 700,000 annual visitors and 260 employees, a fresh perspective was crucial. BAM is in the middle of an ambitious expansion, adding a visual arts space and updating its theaters, as it competes in an increasingly crowded field for New Yorkers’ time and money. The Shed, a $475 million multidisciplinary exhibition- performance space, opened at Hudson Yards this year, and the lionlike Lincoln Center—with its world-class venues for theater, dance, music, and opera—continues to be the city’s standard-bearer. So when Binder’s appointment was announced in February 2018, he was put in the position of charting a new, and everyone hoped unique, direction for BAM’s artistic future.