What’s Coming to BAM in 2025: An Interview With Amy Cassello and Gina Duncan

The Brooklyn Academy of Music heads into 2025 poised for change. Last year, Amy Cassello, who has been with BAM for over a decade, officially became its new artistic director. She joins Gina Duncan, who became BAM’s president in 2022. In her tenure, Duncan has overseen an increase in Black and Brown membership, hosted programming featuring renowned artists such as singer-songwriter Solange Knowles and writer Hanif Abdurraqib, and spearheaded a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s final drama. There will still be plenty to please Brooklyn’s important aging magazine editor demographic—you may have heard that Paul Mescal will star in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire this spring—but we caught up with Duncan and Cassello to hear about what changes the institution has in store for 2025.

You’ve both stepped into new leadership roles at BAM in the last few years. How would you define your priorities for this new era of BAM’s leadership, and how does your experience with the institution inform them?

Gina: I returned to BAM as president in 2022 after serving as its first vice president of Film and Strategic Programming. I knew coming in that I wanted to more closely integrate BAM’s incredible programming across theater, dance, cinema, music and community events to bridge gaps in our audiences and highlight our complementary works across divisions. Amy has been a tremendous partner in this work. As a leadership team, we are always thinking about how we can respond to the needs of our community and support a vibrant arts ecosystem in Brooklyn and beyond.

Amy: Echoing what Gina said, my priority is to present a slate of programs in all genres for all ages that cannot be easily or quickly described. This is where our guest curators are crucial, as they bring necessary expertise to specific genres and/or regions of the world. Through my work at BAM, I’ve come to believe that the most successful shows are those with packed houses of people who look like the ones who populate our great city—meaning a wide range of ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, races, ethnicities, the curious, the die-hard fans, the novices and more—audiences come in buzzing and leave eager to discuss in the lobby what they’ve just seen.

BAM programs across a wide variety of mediums and genres, including film, music, theater and more. Do any programs from 2024 stand out for you as exemplary of the types of work you’re trying to bring to BAM?

Amy: In our fall season, we co-produced an indie-rock musical based on the film Safety Not Guaranteed. With Safety, we invested in new work from a rising creative team and brought our audiences a new kind of musical. BAM has always been a home for risk-taking artists, and I’m excited to continue creating opportunities for artistic experimentation in 2025.

We were also proud to present our first entirely Spanish-language work, without English subtitles: Gaviota, a play adapted by Juan Ignacio Fernandez from Anton Chekhov’s seminal work The Seagull. I booked the Argentinian company to do it after seeing their presentation in Santiago, Chile. We received wonderful feedback from our Spanish-speaking audience. For non-Spanish speakers, the show really demonstrated how storytelling and great acting can transcend language barriers.

How are you thinking about audiences when you program for a season? Specifically, I’m interested in the occasional tension that exists between audiences who expect BAM to stick to the classics versus younger folks looking to BAM for innovation and social justice. 

Gina: As America’s oldest continuously operating performing arts center, we’re committed to striking a balance between tradition and innovation. We’ll always be a place where Brooklynites and tourists can come to see opera or theater or dance. At the same time, BAM has also always championed groundbreaking artists, and one of the ways we honor our history is by prioritizing the ever-changing interests of our borough.

Amy: In my first year as artistic director, my goal has been to provide a platform for new and surprising work without excluding our legacy audiences. We try to curate a seasonal program that appeals to everyone, from families to locals to seasoned theatergoers and younger audiences. Our recent production of Journey LIVE, a live orchestral performance accompanying the video game Journey, is a great example of the kind of audience crossover we love. We had classical music enthusiasts and video game fans in the same room captivated by the multidisciplinary performance.

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Last year, we also collaborated with Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised artist Modesto Flako Jimenez to present Mercedes, Part 1, a multidisciplinary installation that combined documentary, gallery and healing room elements. For Mercedes, Part 1, we partnered with BAM’s community engagement team to bring in the local senior population, who connected to Flako’s moving depiction of his grandmother and her home in Brooklyn.

That said, we continue to present classics adapted to the modern stage. For the holiday season, we had our semi-annual performance of The Hard Nut, which is a modern twist on The Nutcracker by the internationally renowned Mark Morris Dance Group and a classic in its own right. This spring, we’re presenting Barrie Kosky’s contemporary reimagining of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s iconic Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) with St. Ann’s Warehouse. It’s a raunchy critique of capitalist greed with a really intense, experimental score.

You’re the Brooklyn Academy of Music. What does “Brooklyn” mean to you in 2025? 

Gina: At its core, Brooklyn is a place that celebrates community and cultural diversity. We see cultural richness and respect for one another reflected in our food, fashion, how we spend our time and how we choose to interact with our neighbors, and BAM is an extension of that community. We take pride in responding to the evolving needs of this borough.

Amy: BAM, like Brooklyn itself, is full of curious and audacious people, and I prioritize those qualities in our programming. How can we bring people something they’ve never seen before? How can we provoke conversations that will reverberate with contemporary issues? Our art, along with our educational outreach and direct community engagement, should reflect the voracious and ever-changing appetites of the place we live.

There are so many artists and arts organizations in Brooklyn and beyond. How is BAM thinking about its support of other institutions, both locally and across the country? How do you balance programming local talent against bringing in the avant-garde from around the world? 

Gina: BAM is uniquely positioned as both a world-renowned multi-arts institution and a hub right in the center of Brooklyn’s designated cultural district. Through our artist residencies and takeovers and our partnerships with local theaters, we’re helping to ensure the arts continue to thrive in Brooklyn while also creating opportunities for those outside the borough to use our spaces to incubate new works.

Amy: Yes, as Gina said, in our very expensive city, artists need resources to experiment. This past season, BAM hosted Brooklyn-based theater collective the TEAM for a production of Reconstructing (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside) and, as I mentioned earlier, Flako Jimenez’s multidisciplinary Mercedes, Part 1. Providing space for Brooklyn artists to rehearse and create works that could only be made in Brooklyn is one of the most meaningful parts of my job.

At the same time, we’re continuing to bring in the national and international talent that makes BAM a preeminent arts institution on the national stage. We’ve been thrilled by the excitement for A Streetcar Named Desire, which stars Paul Mescal and Anjana Vasan and comes to us from the West End.

When we think about avant-garde, one of the things we’re thinking about is bringing new art forms to BAM. As part of Next Wave this year, we’re hosting Techne, a multi-part, immersive and experiential program with four large-scale digital artworks created with generative A.I. in BAM’s Fishman Space. These four distinct installations were curated by Onassis ONX and are co-presented with the Under the Radar Festival. I’m eager to keep exploring the intersection of art and technology in our programming.

Beyond its public programming, how else does BAM engage with its community? How does BAM provide support to its artists and curators?

Gina: Our education team works closely with our programming team to create opportunities for students and aspiring artists in our borough. We have year-round classroom residencies for DanceAfrica, with a curriculum that changes based on the country we’re honoring that year. We also have a spoken word poetry classroom residency and a theater residency, which this year will focus on Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride (April 15-27 in the Harvey Theatre). Our education team also works with students to place them in arts internships that prepare them for roles in the field.

Amy: We take pride in the care we give artists and curators and the ways we center community in all of our programming. In our Fisher Takeovers program, for example, we’re handing BAM’s four-floor Fisher building over to artists who can then present works in the building for a set amount of time. The takeovers will feature work by an intergenerational group of artists and organizations from BAM’s cultural community, including visual artist José Parlá, Everybooty for LGBTQ+ Pride, and younger artists and curators from BAM’s education programs—each of whom is interested in deepening connections between artists and audience.

Is there any programming for 2025 that you’re particularly excited about? 

Gina: BAM’s Free Music series (BFM) kicked off this month with progressive-soul legend Bilal. I’m looking forward to welcoming our neighbors and visitors to these intimate performances throughout the year. Upcoming in the series, we have performances by percussionist Pedrito Martinez, Roots/Dap Kings trumpeter Dave Guy, Congolese dance band Loboko and more—all with free admission. Hosting free live music has always been fundamental to who we are—and BFM, which is programmed by the incredible Lia Camille Crockett, puts us back in this space in a major way.

Amy: I want to shout out two performances. I’m a big fan of The Threepenny Opera, which I mentioned earlier. It’s funny and sharp, the score is unlike anything else and the message is timeless. Barrie Kosky, Threepenny’s director, has been called “Europe’s hottest opera director.” BAM’s opera house will be the perfect New York venue for this production.

I’m also really looking forward to presenting Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride. Whitney, who received a Tony Award nomination for directing Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, uses pop, rock, gospel and R&B to explore what it means to be an ambitious Black woman through the arc of Lady Macbeth. And she performs the role of Lady Macbeth! This is just the kind of dynamic, innovative and lively production we’ve come to be known for at BAM.