MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY Opens Times Square Headquarters

The Martha Graham Center celebrated the official opening of its new home at 1501 Broadway in Times Square with a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking an exciting new chapter for the organization. Members of the Martha Graham Center's staff and board, dancers, and community partners were joined by New York State Senators Erik Bottcher and Liz Krueger and New York City Council Member Carl Michael Wilson for a ceremony that included a tour of the new space and a glimpse at Graham classes in session.

In February 2025, the Martha Graham Center announced that it was relocating the dance organization's headquarters to the Paramount Building at 1501 Broadway (at 43rd Street), securing a new and expanded home for the renowned Martha Graham Dance Company as it celebrates its 100th anniversary. The new space comprises the Graham Company, School, Offices, and Martha Graham Resources, which oversees archiving and licensing. This state-of-the-art facility will significantly enhance the Center's ability to fulfill its mission of showcasing Martha Graham masterpieces alongside vital contemporary work, and will enable the Center to expand its educational programs into the future.

“The move to Times Square brings together all departments of the Graham Center for the first time in over 25 years,” said LaRue Allen, Martha Graham Dance Company President and Executive Director. “We are delighted to offer the Company dancers first-rate studios along with dressing rooms and backstage amenities they deserve. Perhaps the most dramatic change will be the added capacity for our School. The expansion from two to six studios supports our return to programs the serve children through adults, beginners through professionals.”

The Center's 21,000-square-foot space on the building's 11th floor features six studios that can accommodate a wide range of dance and performing arts activities, including rehearsals, performances, classes, and special events. Studio 1 also functions as a black box theater with theatrical lighting and flexible seating. The space includes dressing rooms, fully-equipped wardrobe space for the Company; and enhanced public, archival, and administrative support areas.

The nearly $10 million project, developed with MBB Architects, was designed with an eye toward the Center's multifaceted programming, the Company dancers, and the School, which welcomes hundreds of students from around the world each year and is the oldest professional dance school in the United States. The Center will also continue to support the dance community and other performing arts groups, at times under a subsidized rental program.

MBB Architects' design adapts the existing Paramount Building to meet the highly specific needs of a professional dance company, transforming former office space into a purpose-built environment for rehearsal, teaching, performance, and administration. The primary Company studios reach ceiling heights of 30 feet, with teaching studios positioned alongside them so the Company and School can operate simultaneously within the facility. Across the Center, approximately 200 linear feet of ballet barres and 215 linear feet of mirrors support daily training and rehearsal.

A centrally located gallery provides a shared gathering space for the Company, School, staff, students, families, and audiences, while approximately 120 linear feet of costume storage supports the Company's extensive wardrobe needs. Together, these features allow the adaptive reuse project to bring a previously dispersed artistic, educational, administrative, archival, and production functions together under one roof.

“From the beginning, we understood that finding a new home for the Martha Graham Dance Company was about much more than meeting a set of program requirements,” said Sara Grant, Partner at MBB Architects. “We were looking for a space with the scale, light, and character appropriate to a company with such an extraordinary history in New York. At the Paramount Building, we saw an opportunity to reveal the architecture that had been obscured over time, opening up a maze of offices to recover the building's original volume and create soaring, light-filled studios beneath its distinctive sawtooth skylights. There's something especially meaningful about giving new life to an existing New York building, allowing its structure and history to support the Company, its School, and its artists as they begin their next century.”