Roulette’s mission is to support artists and present performances of innovative music, movement, and media art; build audiences interested in experiencing new work; and trace the evolution of experimental performance in a freely accessible public archive. Roulette presents and platforms artists whose work confounds expectations—with a focus on new and unusual work by living composers and performers—and highlights and contextualizes historic work by significant artists, especially those who have been excluded due to systemic oppression, through its extensive archive.

Roulette was founded in 1978 by five graduates from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: trombonist/composer Jim Staley, composer/producer David Weinstein, intermedia artist Dan Senn, graphic artist Laurie Szujewska, and composer David Means. Roulette emerged in a TriBeCa loft as a space for risk and discovery, where both young and established artists could explore new territory, invent, and cross-pollinate ideas. This is the spirit that has driven Roulette for over four decades. Following Jim Staley’s 45-year tenure as Artistic Director, in 2024, Roulette shifted to a co-leadership model with Executive Director Jamie Burns and Artistic Director Matt Mehlan. Roulette now annually presents over 120 music, movement, and intermedia performances by some of today’s most prolific artists and their extraordinary emerging counterparts, alongside an additional 150 community and rental events. They also present a monthly podcast, weekly and monthly radio shows, and weekly TV segments on public access. In 2019, Roulette relaunched its free online archive, which now houses over 4,000 newly digitized audio recordings, photos, videos, and ephemera dating back to the early 1980s. In September 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Roulette began livestreaming performances using a robotic camera system and making the livestreams available to the public free of charge. With artists' permission, the muilti-camera video recordings are subsequently added to Roulette's continually-expanding free public archive.

Jerome Foundation supports Roulette’s Commissions and Residencies programs. Each year, Roulette’s Commissions program supports four early-career New York City-based composers with a commissioning fee to create new work for a world premiere in Roulette’s Downtown Brooklyn theater. Artists receive 8 hours of rehearsal time in Roulette’s space, to be utilized in whatever way is most useful to the artist. On the night of their world premieres, each artist has significant A/V team support. Each year, Roulette’s Residency program supports four early-career composers with a residency fee to create and workshop new work, plus a performance date in the Downtown Brooklyn theater. Artists receive 20 hours of project support or recording time to workshop, experiment, and take full advantage of Roulette’s full recording and mixing studio.