La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is dedicated to the artist and all aspects of the theatre. La MaMa is a creative home to artists and audiences from around the world, a dynamic hub for risk-taking performance, and an integral part of New York City’s cultural fabric. 

An artist-driven organization, La MaMa invests in artists at all stages of their career.  La MaMa’s intergenerational, multidisciplinary, and ethnically diverse community of artists are encouraged to take risks, to respond to the pressing issues of our time, experiment freely, and grow through both success and failure. 

Audiences at La MaMa are vital to the creative process. La MaMa’s local and global community members who gather in theirphysical, digital, and hybrid spaces to see new work are often the first audience for that work. The audience response helps to shape the evolution of the piece for the artist and is an essential part of the creative ecosystem that La MaMa nurtures.  

Founded by theatre pioneer Ellen Stewart in 1961, La MaMa is the only original Off-Off-Broadway theatre still in operation. Since its founding, La MaMa has been a welcoming home for anyone typically excluded from the American Mainstream—queer, disabled, Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, immigrant, and international artists. La MaMa sees art as a vehicle for revealing our shared humanity—a core value that guides them. La MaMa has long been at the forefront of a countercultural movement of marginalized and nontraditional artists and their stories. With their artistic community, La MaMa continues to explore and present new models of cultural connectivity.

Jerome Foundation supports La MaMa’s Residency Program and Playwrighting Fellowship. La MaMa’s residency program supports four early career artists each year for 12 months. Artists are fully immersed at La MaMa, supported by staff from all departments. Tailored to the needs of each artist, resources include a fee, unlimited access to La MaMa’s rehearsal studios, and the opportunity to present work in a fully equipped theatre with lights, sound, video, and soft goods. La MaMa’s Playwriting Fellowship is a new program started by playwright Justin Elizabeth Sayre. The Fellowship welcomes early career playwrights to find a home as they develop their own unique voices. Playwriting Fellows meet collectively and with mentor Sayre for monthly work sessions and will have a reading of their new work in La MaMa’s Experiments Play Reading Series.