Roberta Pereira, the director of the Playwrights Realm, will lead the library, which is home to more than eight million items relating to music, theater and dance.
Roberta Pereira has had a career-long goal to make the performing arts accessible for all.
So when she saw a posting for an executive director position at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s leading repositories relating to music, theater and dance, she had an immediate thought: dream job.
“I believe the arts are stronger when more people can participate,” said Pereira, 43, who will become the first Latino person to lead the institution, which is home to more than eight million items. “And the library’s mission is free access and knowledge for all.”
Pereira, currently the executive director of the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway theater company devoted to early-career playwrights, will start the position in January. She succeeds Jennifer Schantz, who left the library in 2022 after two years. (Linda Murray, the curator of the Performing Arts Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the associate director of its collections and research services, filled in as interim director.)
Brent Reidy, the New York Public Library’s director for the research libraries who led the search for Schantz’s replacement, said that the library had received dozens of applications, but that Pereira stood “head and shoulders” above the other candidates.
She had a track record, he said, of innovation. During her eight years at the Playwrights Realm, the organization became a leader in the field of offering caretaker support to audiences and theater workers, which included matinees with free child care and stipends for employees with caretaking responsibilities of both children and adult dependents. She has produced nine Off Broadway premieres, including Sarah DeLappe’s play “The Wolves,” which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In 2017, Pereira co-founded the Artists’ Anti-Racist Coalition, a grass-roots group working to make the theater industry more diverse.
“It’s clear that she has dedicated her career in the performing arts to engaging the public, increasing access and focusing on how to make more people part of the theater community,” Reidy said.
The performing arts library, located in Lincoln Center, is one of the New York Public Library’s four research divisions, with a collection that includes not only books, but also manuscripts, photographs, scores, sheet music, stage designs, costume designs, video and film.
Among its collections are its expansive archive of recorded sound, which includes symphonic recordings, radio plays, political speeches, and its Theater on Film and Tape Archive, which includes more than 8,000 recordings of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions, such as a filmed performance by the original Broadway cast of “The Phantom of the Opera.” (The archive, which has led to similar efforts at other institutions, received a special Tony Award in 2001.)
Pereira, who was born in Brazil, was a classmate of Lin-Manuel Miranda at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater. She later earned a master’s degree in theater management from the Yale School of Drama. She previously worked as a commercial theater producer, including on the Broadway premiere of “Grace,” which starred Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon and Ed Asner, in 2012, and the Olivier Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” in the West End in 2013.
She said she had made frequent use of the library’s holdings over the years. And now, she said, her goal is to tell others about the “undiscovered jewel” on the Upper West Side.
“I want to show people that this incredible archive is open to all, not just researchers,” she said.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
