NEW YORK CITY: International Arts Relations (INTAR Theatre) has announced that after 15 year of service, artistic director Lou Moreno has decided to step down from the position at the end of June. Producing director and former associate artistic director Nidia Medina will succeed him in the role.
“Since the early days of my career as an actor then a director, INTAR has been more than a theatre—it’s been a home,” said Moreno in a statement. “I’ve been privileged to nurture that spirit as artistic director by cultivating a space where creativity and community intersect, where the next generation of artists could find their voice, honing their craft alongside legacy voices that continue to define the richness of Latine theatre.”
For 15 years, Lou Moreno has been at the heart of INTAR, guiding it through a period of artistic growth, resilience, and innovation. Under his leadership, INTAR remained an important incubator for Latine theatre, supporting emerging and legacy voices such as CQ, Maggie Bofill, C. Julian Jiménez, Octavio Solis, and José Rivera. At the start of his tenure, Moreno was faced with a theatre that had no home, so he helped to transform a small studio in Hell’s Kitchen into a thriving creative space, proving that a theatre’s strength lies in its people, not its walls. As theatres began to reopen after the shutdown, he led INTAR with innovation by commissioning and staging MicroTEATRO, a series of short plays performed in local businesses across the neighborhood. Through initiatives like UNIT52, he created opportunities for the next generation of Latine artists, many of whom have carried the spirit of INTAR into new artistic spaces, continuing to shape the cultural fabric of New York and beyond.
“There is truly no place like INTAR—it is an epicenter of Latine creativity and expression, somehow containing the vastness of the Latine experience and the depth of our generations in its modest, unassuming space,” said Nidia Medina in a statement. “In this humbling moment, being entrusted with the future of this legendary Latine artistic space, my mission is clear: to uplift Latine voices in all of our diversity and complexities, to push our artistry continually forward into national and international conversations where it belongs, to keep the well-being of people at the center of our practices, and, of course, to ferociously protect the space that we have cultivated and the community it serves.”
Medina is a theatre producer and artist who was worked professionally in many aspects of nonprofit theatre over the last 17 years. As associate artistic director, she produced the award-winning run of Vámonos by Julissa Contreras. Recently she also worked with WP Theater as artistic producer, leading the charge on the successful run of Sancocho by Christin Eve Cato, and served as interim producing director at The TEAM. Other producing positions include being a line producer at the Public Theater, associate producer and director of the Studio at Theatre for a New Audience, and Special Projects Producer at WP Theater. In addition to her producing work, Nidia is also a writer, performer, and curator of programs and artistic happenings. She holds a BFA in Acting from Emerson College and a Master’s in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute.
International Arts Relations, Inc. (INTAR Theatre), now in its 59th season, is New York City’s oldest Latine theatre company, located in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, with a mission to commission, develop and produce bold, innovative, artistically significant live theatre works generated by Latine artists that make accessible the diversity inherent to America’s cultural heritage. As of 2023, the theatre had a budget of approximately $880,000.
