The New School is a place where education has always been interwoven with public life. Since our founding, our university has served as a meeting place where influential people and ideas intersect, where issues are debated the moment they surface, and where leaders break new ground on a diverse set of topics.
Each year, The New School hosts more than 1,000 public events with some of the most famous and engaged people, organizations, and institutions around the world. These events range from interviews to readings, performances to screenings, connecting what students learn in the classroom with what’s happening in the world.
New School public programs and events, both in person and online, offer viewers a chance to ask questions, discover new ideas, make connections, and find a community of people ready to engage. Unmatched in quality and quantity, public programs are a hallmark of the New School experience.
I saw a public program with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart my freshman year—it was great! I learned that you really have to be thoughtful about what you want to do as an artist."
—Rafah Mahmud, BFA Dramatic Arts, School of Drama
To learn about upcoming events, visit our Events Calendar or sign up for our monthly newsletters.
View past events on our YouTube channel.

Parsons School of Design is delighted to present Latency, a culminating Thesis Show of the 2026 Photography MFA program cohort.The exhibition will begin August 14th and go until September 17th in the Galleries at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. The opening reception will be held on August 20th from 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm.Through the interdisciplinary practices of the 25 individuals, Latency embodies the lag between materialisation and idea. For them, Latency means creating a space in which a brief pause or a visual lag is turned to tangible realities. The exhibition brings together a cohort that isn’t just taking photos, but actively redefining what photography can be.The show captures the tension of something on the verge of appearing, stretching the boundaries of contemporary art. From video to sculpture, silkscreen to image transfers, materials ranging from glass to metal, the work explores the moments where a message finally comes to view.The exhibition features thesis work by: Suga, Francis Chiang, Nazli Erbes, Andrew Finch, Kaitlyn Garcia, Sarah Gray, Lexi Hide, Jai Jain, Aylin Koç, Madison Lanier, Eugene Lee, He Li, Kyla Liang, Ivo Nagel, Stephen Peng, Tania Quintanilla, Valentina Rangel, Maelle Rudner-Mercier, Bai Song, Leana Spain, Jerry Tang, Sophia Valentino, Yu Wang, Hang Yu, and Miraal Zafar.

The Stone at The New School serves as an artist-centric home and community for experimental and avant-garde artists, where they can perform what they want without any interference. With concerts every Wednesday through Saturday evening, The Stone at The New School continues the tradition of the landmark non-profit performance space founded in 2005 by Artistic Director John Zorn, within a greatly improved space.September 2026 will feature residencies by Erik Friedlander, Matt Mitchell, Sana Nagano, Sugar Vendil, and Peter Evans.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation and book launch with internationally renowned economist Mariana Mazzucato on her new book, The Common Good Economy: How to Make Capitalism Work for Us All. Mazzucato will be joined by Institute Senior Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz and Institute Founding Director Professor Darrick Hamilton for a wide-ranging discussion on the book's vision for reimagining the economy around the common good and exploring how new approaches to power, labor, and public purpose can advance human flourishing. Introductory remarks will be provided by Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice for New York City, Julie Su.A book signing and reception will take place in the lower level cafe from 6:30pm to 7:45pm, followed by the panel and talk at 8pm.

Please join us for a reading with Nita Noveno (Nonfiction, 2002 ) as she sits down with Gina Apostol to discuss her memoir Mud on the Moon.About the Book:Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that intertwines a daughter’s exploration of her Filipino immigrant father’s obscured past with a reimagined version of his untold story. Born in Southeast Alaska, Nita Noveno traces the legacy of her father, who arrived in the US in 1928 as part of a wave of Filipino men seeking better opportunities through manual labor in agriculture and other industries. The book alternates between Nita’s coming-of-age story and imagined chapters of her father’s life, revealing the gaps and silences that lie between their experiences. With a blend of personal and historical imagery, Mud on the Moon offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Filipino immigrants in America. It is a meditation on how family, memory, and identity are shaped by the stories we inherit, both spoken and unspoken, across generations.“Mud on the Moon is a lyrical, innovative memoir linking Philippine history to the American present, and the American past to Filipino lives, asking us to see contemporary America, especially but not only Filipino America, in novel ways, in both meanings of that word: as a complex and layered narrative demanding to be told and as an art experiment raising stakes on not only what it means to be American but also what it means to make art. Risk-taking, clear-eyed, but always artful, engaging, and above all embracing of multiple worlds and times, Noveno is a voice for our complex moment.”—Gina Apostol, author of La Tercera and Insurrecto“Mud on the Moon is a beautiful story of a daughter in the act of knowing her father. Noveno collects and creates the threads of his story, stitching and restitching memories, records, artifacts, history, mystery, and fiction. A delight of formal invention, this memoir brilliantly weaves narrative and photograph, father and daughter, fact and fiction, creating a moving, rich, multifaceted portrayal of the life of her father, a Filipino immigrant to the US, and her own.”—Ananda Lima, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land

After the 9/11 attacks, once the smoke cleared and the rubble was removed, New Yorkers faced a fundamental question: who gets to decide the future of Ground Zero? Some wanted the towers back, while others believed the site should remain a memorial. So the city decided to do one of the bravest—or stupidest—things in the history of city planning. They gathered 5,000 representative New Yorkers into the largest town hall in American history. People expected chaos, yelling, maybe even a fistfight. But what happened was democracy. And guess what? It was beautiful. The Center for the American Experience, in partnership with the Department of Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, invites you to a screening of Reclaiming Ground Zero, a documentary revisiting this landmark moment in participatory democracy. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic and Joseph Urban Professor of Design at Parsons School of Design; Carolyn Lukensmeyer, founder of AmericaSpeaks and Executive Director Emerita of the National Institute for Civil Discourse; and Jeremy Varon, Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. The panel will be moderated by New School President Joel Towers.

In the context of Global South narratives and practices, the India-Chinarelationship can best be characterized as competitive cooperation. Driven by both strategic calculations and pragmatic considerations, the two countries compete for strategic space and political influence while simultaneously cooperating in areas where their interests overlap. Understanding this complex relationship requires examining how India and China engage in debates over Global South identity, pursue different development paths and working patterns with the North, and participate inthe construction of new institutional mechanisms. That’s why their interaction demonstrates “uncoordinated coordination” in certain issue areas despite differences in their responses to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the more recent U.S.-Israel-Iran confrontation. Ultimately, their competitive cooperation relationship over divergent strategic interests, competing national priorities, and different interpretations of globalorder are helping the Global South, as a loosely connected community of nations, develop shared understanding, build collective strength, and explore its own path of development and global engagement.Speaker:Chao XIE: Associate Professor, Institute of International Studies, Fudan University, China
The New School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.
