Dominick Balletta Leaves National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene to Form New Producing and Management Entity, High Hard Heat

Dominick Balletta, who has served as Executive Director of National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene for over four years, will depart that position on February 4, 2024, to establish High Hard Heat, a company where he will focus on producing and managing projects in live performance and film. Balletta will also expand his strategic planning work with the new entity which straddles the commercial and non-profit worlds and spans a wide range of genres and budgets. 

At National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, he served as the New York City originating producer for Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman's Harmony, which transferred to Broadway in October 2023 following an award-winning sold-out run Off-Broadway in 2022. He was also the lead producer of the 2022 Off-Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, directed by Joel Grey, at New World Stages, and the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie's opera The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis, in partnership with New York City Opera. In November 2023, he produced the world premiere of Amid Falling Walls, which presented Yiddish music and poetry rescued from ghettos, displaced person camps and other locations, that provided first-person testimony of how Jews lived and resisted the forces of the Holocaust. At Folksbiene, Balletta also helped develop a curriculum educating over 3,000 students on issues of anti-Semitism.  

He received a Tony Award nomination as a producer of Moisés Kaufman's 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda, a highlight of his thirteen-year tenure with Tectonic Theater Project.
 
In film, Balletta was a producer of Scott Freiman's Deconstructing the Beatles series, as well a pair of films directed by Jonathan Demme: Another Telepathic Thing (Executive Producer) and I'm Carolyn Parker (Associate Producer).  In addition to NYTF, he has served as a non-profit senior executive for Jacob Burns Film Center, Film Forum, Ensemble Studio Theater, and Pan Asian Repertory Theater.
 
Since 2011, he was an Advisor/Associate Consultant to the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, working with organizations globally on issues of strategic planning, in addition to handling private clients.
 
His work as a panelist for granting organizations includes work for multiple New York State Council on the Arts programs, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs,ArtsWestchester, and CEC/ArtsLink. He is a member of the Industry Board for ArcStages, located in Pleasantville, NY.
 
Awards and nominations for works Balletta developed include the 2022 Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Outstanding Off Broadway Musical and 2023 Lucille Lortel Award and 2022 Drama Desk Award nominations for Outstanding Musical for Harmony (Off-Broadway); a 2009 Best Play Tony Award nomination for 33 Variations; a 1998 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Show for Danny Hoch's Jails Hospitals Hip-Hop; and a 1997 GLAAD Media Award nomination for Best Play for Theatre Couture's Tell Tale. 
 
Balletta begins his new role with High Hard Heat on Monday, February 5.

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