Brown Arts

As Producing Director of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI), Wasilewski is responsible for overseeing all aspects of new performances and installations developed by the BAI. Wasilewski previously served as Senior Producer at Park Avenue Armory, where she produced large-scale dance, theater, music, opera, and multimedia productions and visual art installations and facilitated projects including Carrie Mae Weems’ The Shape of Things (II) and Land of Broken Dreams convening, Bill T. Jones’ Deep Blue Sea, Nick Cave’s The Let Go, Regg Roc Gray, the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, and Peter Sellars’ FLEXN and FLEXN Evolution, Tayrn Simon’s An Occupation of Loss, Heiner Goebbel’s De Materie, Marina Abramović’s Goldberg, and Martin Creed’s The Back Door. Wasilewski managed the Armory’s artist-in-residence program and provided curatorial and producing support to the organization’s Public Programming series, including Carrie Mae Weems’ lauded symposium, The Shape of Things, the United Lenape Nations’ first Manhattan-based Pow Wow, Theaster Gates’s Black Artist Retreat, the multi-partner digital initiative 100 Years | 100 Women, marking the centennial of the 19th Amendment. 

From 2008 to 2015, Jessica served as Producer for Peak Performances at Montclair State University, where she supported the development and world premiere performances of David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s Dog Days; Robert Wilson, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Toshi Reagon’s Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter; and Richard Schechner’s Imagining O, as well as the presentation of international performance companies such as Urwintore, Wayne McGregor|Random Dance, Vincent Dance Theatre, and Troubleyn|Jan Fabre. Jessica’s prior professional experiences include administrative, producing, and educational positions with Lincoln Center Festival, Dance Theatre Workshop, and the American International School in Salzburg, Austria.  

In 2017, Wasilewski was awarded a fellowship by Cambodian Living Arts to support her research on the international presentation of culturally-specific performance practices. She was a curatorial consultant for the development of complementary programming for the North American premiere of BANGSOKOL: A Requiem for Cambodia, commissioned by Cambodian Living Arts and presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2017 and served on the Board of Directors of Nimbus Dance Works in Jersey City, NJ from 2010 to 2015. Jessica is an alumna of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ Emerging Leaders Institute, holds a B.A. in Dance from Muhlenberg College, and an M.A. in Curatorial Practice in Performance from Wesleyan University.