

The Biennial Consortium is a selective network of New York City’s leading art and cultural institutions that join Performa every two years to present and support performances and exhibitions across the city. First established with the inaugural Performa Biennial in 2005, the Consortium has remained at the heart of the biennial, setting the stage for citywide partnerships that highlight New York’s status as the performance capital of the world every other November.
As Performa marks its 20th anniversary in 2025, the Consortium reflects both the creative history of the city and its living legacy of radical performance. Since the 1950s and 60s, New York has been the meeting point for artists across disciplines who have shaped the international avant-garde, and the Consortium continues to carry that spirit forward.
This year, the network expands with new partners—including Americas Society and Come Forever Garage—while also welcoming back long-standing collaborators such as Asia Society and Metrograph. Together, these institutions affirm performance’s vital role in shaping cultural dialogue and collective imagination.






Originally from Zurich, Switzerland, Yvonne Meier has been choreographing and performing her work since 1980. She has received Bessie’s Awards for her work, which span anywhere from solos to large-scale post-modern spectacles. Over the years, Meier has developed a high-risk movement vocabulary that takes the audience through transformation by exhaustion.
Meier, known for her physical wit and dark humor, creates Strega Nona—a work about lovers brought together by a matchmaker called Strega Nona. The dance that follows, she writes, “is brutal…erotic, and tender.” Dancers Osmani Tellez and Lisa Kusanagi perform scores of Meier and Ishmael Houston-Jones’ love duet Tell Me (1987), which they danced in New York in the ’90s.