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Touring performance works is often the goal for many artists, but how do you know where to begin and what the first steps are to moving your work and engaging new audiences? How can you leverage your current relationships to initiate the process?

In this Artist Lab conversation, join producer and educator, Linsey Bostwick in conversation with artist and Creative Capital awardee, Okwui Okpokwasili, as they discuss approaches and strategies to think through touring, budgeting and investigating the “real deal” with being a performing artist on the road.

About the Contributors

Linsey Bostwick currently serves as the Director of the NYU Production Lab. Linsey also works with performance company Sweat Variant in Partnership Development as well as an adjunct professor for NYU Tisch School of the Arts in Theater Management Studies.

Linsey spent 2016-2022 as the Director of Artistic Planning at The Arts Center at New York University Abu Dhabi. Previously she spent many years producing works in New York City and internationally. From 2010-2016 she worked on the producing team of Pomegranate Arts. She had been a long time creative/producing collaborator with Big Art Group among other artists. Bostwick holds two Bachelor’s degrees from University of Washington: Seattle and a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in Interactive Performance and Media Arts.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include “Bessie” Award-winning pent-up: a revenge dance, “Bessie” Award-winning Bronx Gothic, as well as my tongue is a blade, let slip, hold sway, adaku, part 1: the road opens, poor people’s TV room, poor people’s TV room (SOLO), when I return who will receive me, Adaku’s revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head.

In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among others.