Wiley Hausam to Run NYU’s 950-seat Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
New York University President L. Jay Oliva today announced the appointment of Wiley Hausam, a long-time performing arts producer and arts administrator, as executive director of the University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The Skirball Center is under construction, part of the Kimmell Center for University Life; the 924-seat proscenium theatre is expected to debut its opening performance in early 2003.
With the construction of the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYU will create an important new cultural venue: the only state-of-the-art proscenium theatre of its size nearly 1,000 seats south of Times Square. The Center will provide a new, vibrant and important performing arts location for student productions and University events, performances and other cultural events for NYU and its neighborhood, and a showcase for the Vilar Fellows young performers in NYU’s Rhodes Scholarship-type program for the performing arts.
Dr. Oliva, who announced his intention to step down from NYU’s presidency last spring, will become the Executive Producer and Chairman of the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in May 2002.
Most recently, Mr. Hausam was an independent producer and production consultant for such performing arts organizations as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Santa Fe Opera, the actress Faith Prince, and is the Director of The Songbook Series at Joe’s Pub.
Dr. Oliva said, “At this point, with the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts still under construction, we can only imagine its importance. But we at NYU have a magnificent imagination. I believe that it will stand out among New York’s cultural venues for its elegance as a performance space, for the unique compound it will create between the academic world and the world of performing arts, for the opportunities it will afford our students in arts program to learn and showcase work, and for its downtown location.
“Clearly such an important venue requires a top professional, someone who could see the potential for the Center and develop it into the indispensable cultural site it will ultimately come to be. I am very pleased to have Wiley Hausam on board and to welcome him to the University community.”
From 1993 2000, Mr. Hausam was the associate producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Joseph Papp Public Theater, where he supervised the development of musical theatre, including “Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk” (a winner of four Tony Awards. He also initiated the Songbook Series in Joe’s Pub, which presents such singers as Audra McDonald, Ute Lemper, Lea DeLaria, and theatre composers such as Michael John LaChiusa, among others, and provided the venue for the return to the stage of Broadway legends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. In 2001, the Series received the Backstage Bistro Award.
In 1999, he produced two concerts for Nonesuch Records in Town Hall featuring Audra McDonald and Adam Guettel.
In 2000, he produced Faith Prince’s acclaimed solo concert debut, “A Leap of Faith.”
Prior to joining the Public Theater, Mr. Hausam was a theatre, film and television literary agent for International Creative Management. There he represented such artists as George Wolfe, Michael John LaChiusa, Anna Deveare Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Gerald Gutierrez, Mark Lamos, and Robert Falls.
Mr. Hausam, who received a Bachelor’s degree in music from Northwestern and attended the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern, teaches in the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program in the Tisch School of the Arts. He is the editor of a forthcoming anthology of new musicals for the Theatre Communications Group.