MA Top 30 Professional: Kelley Nicole Girod

Director of New Works
The Apollo Theater

When one thinks of Harlem’s iconic Apollo, it’s usually within an historical context, as the site of legendary performances over the decades. But what about as an incubator of cutting-edge new works?

Enter Kelley Girod. Inaugurating a role created after the pandemic, Girod commissions and manages fresh theatrical works and longform compositions. Composer/pianist Billy Childs, for example, is currently at work on an operatic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, after receiving the late author’s blessing. And saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who succeeded author Ta-Nehisi Coates as the theater’s artist-in-residence, is composing a long, orchestral work for ballet. Between in-house commissions and partnerships with other institutions, Girod estimates the Apollo has presented somewhere between 30 and 40 new pieces since she arrived in 2021.

“Everybody knows the Apollo as a place where every famous person has performed,” she says, “we have done theater and dance. Now we have the opportunity to lean more into doing—and feeding—new work.”

Girod comes to the Apollo with deep bona fides from New York’s Black theater scene. In 2009, she founded The Fire This Time, an annual festival spotlighting short works by early career African and African-American playwrights. “We were really pushing back against what we felt the industry was saying, which was support[ing]
a very specific type of Black voice,” Girod says. “We knew that we contained multitudes, that we weren’t a monolith.”

The Obie Award-winning festival, which she still oversees, will move in January 2026 to the Apollo Stages at the Victoria Theater—a new, nearby facility with two black box theaters and gallery and office space.

Girod is a one-woman dynamo at the Apollo, though she coordinates closely with her colleagues in the programming department. For her, one of many “pinch me” moments on the job came recently, during workshops of Kindred. The Apollo hosted the first half-hour of the opera for an invited audience of industry professionals from the tristate area.

“There was something about hearing new opera in the Apollo’s new Victoria Theater spaces that made me so emotional,” she says.