A Tony Award-winning producer who has helped organize more than 100 new productions in music, theater and dance, Bob Bursey was appointed executive director of Texas Performing Arts beginning Jan. 1, 2020. He came to Austin from New York, where he served as executive director of the Richard B. Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College.
During Bursey’s seven-year tenure at the Fisher Center — a Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center on the campus of Bard College in New York — programming, yearly audiences and board membership more than doubled. Milestones included eliminating a seven-figure annual deficit, creation of a $5 student ticket fund, helping launch a new work commissioning and artist residency program, and extending the profile of the organization through projects such as the 2019 Tony Award-winning reinvention of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”, which began as a student production at Bard.
His work includes projects that have been variously recognized as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times), “The #1 Theatrical Event Of The Year” (Time), and “a bastion of imaginative programming” (The Wall Street Journal).
Prior to his appointment at the Fisher Center, Bursey was producing director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. His 10-year role with the renowned company culminated in the founding of New York Live Arts, an organization created through an innovative merger with Dance Theater Workshop. Having mounted performances in more than two dozen countries while working with legendary touring artists such as the German dance-theater maker Pina Bausch early in his career, Bursey brings a global perspective to Austin.
