The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of the Graduate Center Foundation is home to theatre artists, scholars, students, managers, and local & international performance communities, providing a supportive environment for conversation, open exchange, and the development of educational, community-driven, and professional projects in the performing arts. The Center presents a wide variety of free public programs year-round, which feature leading national and international artists, scholars, and arts professionals and serve to enrich the lives of CUNY’s constituent communities across New York City. 

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Presented at the Graduate Center, CUNY, for 20 years, the annual PRELUDE festival has been dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary, and mediatized performance. PRELUDE offers an array of short performances, readings, and screenings—a completely free survey of the current New York moment and the work being prepared for the next season and beyond—as well as new commissions and panel discussions with artists, scholars, and performers. PRELUDE is a place to discover the voices shaping the future of theatre and performance in NYC, to observe, engage, commune, and critique.

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Segal Center programs like PRELUDE (New York City playwrights, directors and ensembles showing work in progress), Global World Voices Festival (international playwrights festival), the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance have been ambitious in scale, epic in scope, challenging in form, controversial in subject matter, experimental in concept, and/or unabashed in their theatricality. The Center serves as a resource center for CUNY, for New York City, and for the nation; and disseminates the results of its activities to the scholarly community and to the world at large through publications, conferences, and exhibitions. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, occupies a place unlike any other organization in New York City: in the space between public arts presenter, academic publisher, and research nexus. For more than 20 years, the Segal Center has served as a bridge between the academic and professional performing arts communities by fostering dialogue between playwrights, directors, designers, choreographers, filmmakers, critics, and academics from New York and around the world.

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Having founded The World Voices Festival in 2004 and presented over 100 works for the screen by theatre artists from over 50 countries in 2022 as part of the 7th Segal Center Film Festival, the MESTC and its leadership are no strangers to festival creation. In 2025, MESTC will present the inaugural program of the city-wide international performing arts Down to Earth Festival dedicated to multidisciplinary performance, contemporary theater, outdoor arts, and new circus, integrated into city streets, parks and urban spaces.