Seating at New Theater Hollywood. Courtesy New Theater Hollywood. Photo: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff

New Theater Hollywood is a forty-nine-seat black box theater on Santa Monica Boulevard dedicated to experimental and interdisciplinary performance. Created in 2024 by artists Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, founders of Berlin’s New Theater, which operated from 2013 to 2015, the space supports time-based work by artists who move between performance, visual art, film, and writing. Artists receive rehearsal time, creative and logistical support, and are encouraged to use the space as a working studio, not just a presentation venue. Through this flexible structure developed by Pitegoff and Henkel, New Theater Hollywood allows artists to take creative risks and build work collaboratively. 

Over the next two years, the space plans to produce roughly twelve projects annually. Confirmed artists for 2025 and 2026 include Diamond Stingily, Tarren Johnson, Caye Castagnetto, Asher Hartman, and Emil Weinstein. In fall 2025, a new project by Leilah Weinraub developed in residence at the theater will premiere in partnership with the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2025. Upcoming work includes a performance collaboration between John Kelsey and Jim Fletcher, a new play by Sam Anderson, and a translation and staging of a play by Vladimir Sorokin, led by translator Max Lawton. In 2026 and 2027, the theater will commission new work by Aria Dean, Marie Karlberg, and Mykki Blanco. 

Asher Hartman, The Mommy Leaks the Floor, 2025 (performance view). New Theater Hollywood, Los Angeles, May 16–25; June 6–8, 2025. Courtesy New Theater Hollywood. Photo: Danielle Neu

The venue also functions as a curatorial platform for research-based and site-specific projects. Starting in summer 2025, a collaboration with writer Oliver Bentley-Misraje will launch monthly literary sightseeing bus tours that explore Los Angeles through the lens of Southern California Gothic. The tours will invite artists, writers, and performers to contribute site-specific texts, videos, or performances, shared on the bus or in the street as it passes through each neighborhood.

Sketch for Southern California Gothic (2025) by Oliver Bentley-Misraje and produced in collaboration with New Theater Hollywood, Los Angeles. Courtesy New Theater Hollywood. Photo: Calla Henkel

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are the founders and co-directors of New Theater Hollywood. Working together as artists for fifteen years, their practice centers on the founding and operation of venues as sites of social and collaborative artistic production. The programming of these spaces is integral to their work. Past spaces include the bar and performance venue TV Bar (Berlin, 2019–22) and the original New Theater (Berlin, 2013–15), a storefront theater in which artists were invited to perform alongside their work. From 2017 to 2018, they served as artistic directors of the Grüner Salon, a side stage at the historic Volksbühne Theater in Berlin, where they formed a para-institutional “theatre within a theatre” through programming performances and producing a series of original plays.

Camila Marambio, Mauricio Marcín, Para la Naturaleza (PLN)