About the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts
The Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts offers Brooklyn College and New York City a space for learning, gathering, production, and presentation. Through collaboration and joy, the Tow Center proposes art as a catalyst for reimagining how we understand value on a personal and cultural level.
In both its programming and operations, the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts holds itself accountable to its priorities through transparency and revision. This praxis is essential to how we situate ourselves in relationship to art and the agreements we make to empower creative work in an increasingly bureaucratic and economically driven society. We imagine sustainable, joyous ways of being in the world together alongside the Canarsie and Munsee Lenape people, the original caretakers of this land, and the Black, Afro/Latino/a/x, Caribbean, Jewish, Asian, Middle Eastern, Slavic, ethnic immigrant, and disabled communities of the Midwood-Flatbush neighborhood. These disparate knowledges are essential to our collective well-being.
The Tow Center’s 128,000-square-foot facility and staff support Brooklyn College’s School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts, producing 120 public events each year with the Conservatory of Music and the Department of Theater; 60 additional events created by and for Brooklyn College students, staff, and faculty; and its own curated programs.
The Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts reopened its doors in 2018 after undergoing a significant seven-year capital improvement project. Built alongside the existing 2,400-seat Whitman Theater (now the Claire Tow Theater), the new state-of-the-art facility includes the 190-seat Don Buchwald Theater, the 120-seat New Workshop Theater, and more than 100 music rehearsal spaces, recital halls, practice rooms, recording studios, and theater workshops.
Established in 1951 as College Community Services—but known city-wide as Brooklyn Center at Brooklyn College (BCBC)—the former performing arts center was composed of Whitman Hall, the George Gershwin Theater, and the Sam Levenson Recital Hall. These entities were dissolved in 2018 to make way for the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts.
For more than 70 years, some of the world’s beloved and most accomplished artists have presented work at the center, from classic legends such as Leontyne Price (who opened the inaugural season), Zubin Mehta, The Joffrey Ballet, Marilyn Horne, Itzhak Perlman, Luciano Pavarotti, Paul Taylor Dance Company, The Acting Company, Peter Martins, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Edward Villella, to popular headliners like Tony Bennett, Pearl Bailey, Alan King, Patti LuPone, Linda Ronstadt, Arlo Guthrie, Ray Charles, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, The Beach Boys, the Ramones, Santana, Jerry Seinfeld, the Grateful Dead, and Angelique Kidjo, to innovators like Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Gregory Hines, and the Dance Theater of Harlem.
Staff
Eveline Chang, Director, Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts
Lucanus Hotaling, Production
Andrew Kerr-Thompson, Production
Hasan Ozcan, Director, Preparatory Center
Marcus Richardson, Executive Director
Thomas Selsey, Production
Gerard Vaccarello, House Manager / Patron Services
John Vetter, Box Office Manager / Ticketing Services
Steven Wizior, Box Office Staff