Today, Associate Professor and artist Carlos Motta speaks with Taja Cheek, a Brooklyn-born curator and musician based in New York City.

Taja is presently Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, a radical interdisciplinary performance institution in the East Village, founded in 1980 as PS122 and is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who frequently records and performs under the name L’Rain.

Taja was guest curator for the 2024 Whitney Biennial performance program and led performance programs at MoMA PS1, including Warm Up, a summer outdoor music series that the museum has hosted in its courtyard since 1998, and Sunday Sessions, an interdisciplinary performance series. As a curator Taja has championed the creation of new performance works and has worked closely with artists for many years.

Experimental and emotive, her music explores composition and structure and addresses themes of grief, identity, emotion and experience.