Gala 2025 RAFFLE + DONATIONS!

The Chocolate Factory's Fourth Annual Gala, honoring Chocolate Factory Co-Founder / Executive Director Emerita Sheila Lewandowski. Hosted by Becca Blackwell. Performance by Ayano Elson. Food by Little Chef Little Cafe.

CATCH 79

CATCH is the Obie award-winning, itinerant, rough and ready series of performance events that whirls through Brooklyn and other cities. For years, Catch has given stage to emerging artists and downtown luminaries, pouring equal portions of community, love, and beer.

Early Stage Creative Residencies

Throughout the 2025 / 2026 season, ten artists selected via a peer nomination process will each receive access to space and financial support for early stage research into their new projects.

The Chocolate Factory Theater Gala 2025

Join us on Tuesday, September 30, 2025, for an unforgettable evening at The Chocolate Factory Theater’s Fourth Annual Gala as we proudly honor this year’s Artist In Industry Award recipient: Sheila Lewandowski, Co-founder and Executive Director Emerita. Sheila’s vision, passion, and tireless dedication are the very foundation of The Chocolate Factory Theater. Over the decades, she has poured her heart and soul into building a home for our community of artists and groundbreaking work—transforming a dream into a vital cultural institution.

Martita Abril

Martita Abril continues her ongoing exploration of her - and our - relationship to border life, and its distortions, contradictions, oppressions, and deep emotional resonance. Inviting audiences into a layered, multisensory experience - incorporating a performance by Mexican banda ensemble Directos de la Sierra, the onstage presence of Martita’s mother, and a mezcal offering - Tacos de Lengua introspectively navigates the dualities of identity, resistance, separation, geography, and mirroring.

Netta Yerushalmy, Tuçe Yasak, Mieke Ulfig, Katherine Profeta, Paula Matthusen, Alla Kovgan

Alla Kovgan (film), Paula Matthusen (sound/music), Katherine Profeta (text), Mieke Ulfig (graphic arts), Tuçe Yasak (light/installation), and Netta Yerushalmy (movement) come together to devise nothing personal, just everything – a multi-sensory tangle of pictures, bodies, and objects in motion. Interrogating ideas of femaleness, fleshiness, the passage of time, the evasive notion of belonging, and the survival practices of their artist-heroines through history, these six makers move in and out of step with one another, constructing and dismantling jagged landscapes.

Ruth Childs

In her solo performance Blast!, Ruth Childs crafts a choreographed dialogue with the percussive sound design of Stéphane Vecchione, weaving its rhythms and ruptures together with movement into a choreographic circle. Drawing from her observations of how humans express themselves, Childs confronts and interacts with representations of bodies that embody a terrible violence.

Autumn Knight

NOTHING: more is an anti-still life, a moving composition of objects and bodies in a process of making and remaking the self.

Saturday Salons

In the spirit of the unfinished, the unformed, and the untamed, the Saturday Salons bring together visual artists, writers, musicians, composers, performers, and others to present selections from works-in-process.

Karinne Keithley Syers

Your Ghost Body is a memory palace in the form of a playable junkyard. Its genesis was an inquiry into the way I carry the landscapes of childhood and adolescence with me as a psychic possession and the question of what to do in middle age with the vestigial homing instinct for a place I no longer inhabit.