BAM Appoints Tony Award-Winning Producer As Artistic Director
FORT GREENE – The President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Katy Clark, announced yesterday that the Tony Award-winning Broadway Producer, David Binder, has been appointed BAM’s Artistic Director.
Binder will officially assume his new role in January 2019, but in the meantime, he will work part-time alongside BAM’s exiting longtime Executive Producer, Joseph V. Melillo, who will retire in December after 35 years at the cultural institution.
Binder is best known for bringing John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch to the off-Broadway Westbeth Theater in 1997 and then to Broadway 17 years later in a production that won four Tony Awards in 2014, including Best Musical Revival.
He’s also produced John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the first Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, De La Guarda, and Fuerza Bruta.
The producer also has extensive experience organizing arts festivals, including the 2007 High Line Festival, which was curated by David Bowie, as well as the 2009 New Island Festival on Governors Island—a 10-day event celebrating performance art and music from the Netherlands. Binder will also serve a Guest Artistic Director of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) in June, which will feature Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley and MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” recipient, Taylor Mac.
BAM is one of the city’s leading arts organizations, with an annual budget of approximately $50 million, 247 employees, and an annual audience of 750,000, according to the New York Times.
“I am especially pleased to note that David’s arrival signals a major step forward in realizing BAM’s plan for a more holistic artistic vision,” Clark said in the announcement. “The new title of Artistic Director reflects a complete alignment of all of our programming areas—live performance, cinema, education, community, humanities, digital, visual art, and the archives—under one curatorial team, led by David in close collaboration with VP of Education and Community Engagement Coco Killingsworth and Associate VP of Cinema Gina Duncan, and will extend to our new spaces currently under construction.”
