Interview: Joe's Pub Director Alex Knowlton on the Club's 2025-26 Season

Header photo depicts current Vanguard resident Justin Vivian Bond photographed by Alaric Campbell

Joe’s Pub, located in the heart of downtown Manhattan in the East Village, curates a wonderful collection of emerging and established artists representing the colorful fabric of New York City’s millions of residents. We spoke with Joe’s Pub’s director Alex Knowlton ahead of their 2025-26 season about their mission and goals, which include programs for artist development (the next Working Group cohort is currently accepting applications through Sunday June 15 at 11:59 pm) and saying “yes” to exciting and innovative new work. You can browse the calendar to see what they already have posted, including current Vanguard resident Justin Vivian Bond’s pride celebration Well Well Well, running through June 29. “It's really so different any given night,” Knowlton said of the programming.

Read our conversation below for more on how Joe’s finds and develops some of the best emerging talent NYC has to offer.

Can you tell me a little bit about the process of shaping Joe's Pub’s 2025-26 season?

As you can imagine, the Joe's Pub calendar is sort of [a] never-ending, never halting... I think of a horizon line that doesn't ever quite get any closer to you.

We're operating almost every night of the year, year-round. And so, over the years, we've tried to build a little shape to mirror The Public Theater's artistic season so that we have a moment of reflection to look back on and a moment to wrap our arms around the year ahead. So, we've created some shape to it and part of that has been aligning the artistic development programs to announce and be shaped within this September to August year. That is how we, as a larger institution, think of our artistic year.

We have three artist development programs. There's the Joe's Pub Working Group, which is a five-artist cohort. It's really peer-driven and working on building tools of being an independent artist. Applications [for that program] are open now through mid-June and the new cohort will begin in September.

[And then] the New York Voices Commission program, that's really been organic conversations with artists within our community... just trying to, over the course of the year talk to folks about what they're working on, what they're excited about. If there's other theaters or venues or granting organizations that we see familiar names pop up within, sometimes I'll reach out and ask what they're working on, if we can be a little extra wind in their sails for a project that's already underway. This year, the commission with Taylor Mack has been sort of organically generated from some conversations we were having.

And our Vanguard residency this year with Justin Vivian Bond... Every year, I'm sort of shocked that we're able to be in dialog with these incredible artists. And of course, Viv is part of our year-in, year-out, month-in, month-out program and has been sort of in residence with us one way or another for the past 20, 25 years, so this feels like a great moment to really honor and formalize the impact that Viv has on our artistic community and on the calendar.

All that to say, thinking about this season, there's very little on the calendar that we've really announced yet, just because we're sort of always rolling on the performance calendar, but we've started to tease out a couple of things into the fall, including Viv's first curated show on September 29th with Garnet Williams, which is really exciting and the first time we'll have her on the stage, doing her own headlining show.

What type of people do you want to apply for the Working Group residency? Everybody possible. This is our 10th year doing the Working Group. We've had a couple of different names. But we try to keep the criteria really simple and the application really short and sweet. The criteria for applying for the Working Group is to have been a performer or participant in a Joe's Pub performance in some way, shape or form. We've had costume designers that have been in the Working Group; we've obviously had performers; there's been some songwriters and composers. We try to make it a multidisciplinary group, and we really like to have, as much as we can, a top-down look at a large field of performers and artists within the community.

So, having been involved in a Joe's Pub performance in the past and being New York-based are the two application criteria, and really far and wide within those two criteria, we encourage really everybody to apply. That includes a lot of people. It's always nice. I remember two years ago, Latasha Diggs applied, and it was such an amazing opportunity to get to know her more deeply. She performed, I think, the first night that Joe's Pub opened in October 1998, and we institutionally had sort of fallen out of touch with each other, and so it was such a great moment to have her back. One of the questions on the application is, “What was your first performance and what was your last performance?” And her first performance was opening night, and her most recent performance was on a curated show with our then-Vanguard resident, Laurie Anderson, and I don't think she'd been on the Joe's Pub stage in between, so it felt like a really cool bookend moment to bring back these longstanding relationships that we hadn't kept for a long time and reintroduce ourselves to artists in the community.

As director, can you talk a little bit about how you try to strike a balance in tone and style of content when you're shaping the entire scope of a yearlong season?

We have this wonderful mission within a mission. Being a nonprofit music and performance club within a nonprofit theater, we are able to be a big part of the larger institutional goals and mission. The Public Theater's mission is to create theater of, by, and for the people of New York, and I think of what we do in Joe's [Pub] as really a way to really give 600 “yeses” to artists over the course of a year. As opposed to having the burden of whittling down so many artistic conversations to a small season that runs for a long time, we have a lot of opportunities to reach a lot of people. So our goals are on a sort of macro level to give an opportunity for all 8 to 12 million New Yorkers to feel themselves represented or see a mirror back to them, or hear a story that resonates with them or they themselves to be on our stage or represented by the performances on the stage.

So, that's sort of the impossible, quixotic mission of what we do. [It feels like the] never-approaching horizon line. There's new New Yorkers that arrive every day and there's new communities that are developing within pockets of the city and voices that are emerging from within all corners of our community, and so it's a never-ending goal. And I know that sort of doesn't quite answer your question, because it's a real lovey-dovey answer to a tactical question of, “How do we keep balance?” It's really about like looking at a week and feeling like we have a multitude of voices and performers and aesthetics within a week.

Sometimes we have a wider range than others, and then can we look okay this week against last week? Are we expanding the voice of artists that we're giving this month, against last month, against next month, and sort of always trying to be in dialog with our own calendar, if we see, just by nature of conversations or even personal taste being drawn in One Direction or another, sort of trying to fight some urges, and build some new pathways for relationships or performers or aesthetics that might not exist on our stage otherwise.

Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

Just keep an eye on what's coming up, because like I said, the fall calendar is on the in the very early stages of being put out there into the world. We're really excited to work with Viv on this curated year and see what they've got cooking up, and I'm really excited to meet some new Working Group applicants. This is such a great way to meet new artists because oftentimes when we have a performance, we will administratively speak to either the band leader or a manager or a singular person that's representing a group, and so we don't necessarily always directly communicate with everybody on the stage. That's why we've built the working group the way it is, that it's an opportunity for us to get to know individuals that have been on our stage and may find Joe's Pub to be a home or an aspirational home, that we're not in direct communication with.

So, I really encourage everybody not to cut themselves out if they're considering applying. We want everybody to please apply. This is how we get to know you. And even if it's not a yes, sometimes these moments of communication and insight can lead to future shows or future residencies or just knowing each other.