ADAM LENZ
producer . curator . educator . artist

Adam Lenz is a freelance producer and curator based in Hartford, Connecticut. His interests in art are centered in the overlap between sound, performance, and the visual arts, and have informed his approach to organizing cultural programs for nearly two decades.

 

From 2021–2026, Adam served as the Public Engagement and Programs Manager at The Wadsworth, the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States. In this role, he organized more than two hundred public programs, fifty being performance centered. Each of these programs were crafted with a focus on the museum's special exhibitions, permanent collection, and rich institutional history, encompassing a range of formats from interactive programs and performances to gallery talks and public lectures. Recent lectures and artist conversations featured a wide array of artists and scholars including, Pipilotti Rist, Laurie Anderson, Byron Kim, Justine Kurland, Martino Stierli, Marie Watt, Babatunde Lawal, Tom Burr, Torkwase Dyson, James Voorhies, Stephanie Syjuco, Matt Paweski, Lisa Alvarado, Talia Chetrit, Kyle Dunn, Alan Ruiz, Steffani Jemison, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Mariel Capanna, Robert Calafiore, Deborah Brown, and many more.

 

Through this position, Adam also conducted extensive archival research examining the history of performance at The Wadsworth. These efforts made a significant contribution to identifying unprocessed archival materials and helping to resurface the institution’s rich history of dance, particularly the support of postmodern choreographers in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside this research, he produced a conversation with Yvonne Rainer reflecting on her work Parts of Some Sextets (1965) that premiered at the museum before, welcomed choreographer Deborah Hay for a lecture and site-specific performance in the gallery where she first presented her work at the museum in 1970, and invited Janine Antoni to speak on her groundbreaking performance Loving Care (1993), a work that had its first public performance in the United States at the museum in 1996. From 2023–2026, Adam co-produced Tell Me Where It Comes From (2025), a dance-theater work created by choreographer and dancer Emily Coates that reflects on George Balanchine’s brief 1933 arrival in Hartford through the sponsorship of The Wadsworth as a launching point for examining the seminal choreographer through his archival remains. The work was commissioned by Works & Process for premiere at Guggenheim New York and subsequently presented at The Wadsworth and the Schwarzman Center at Yale University.

 

Adam also brought attention to the museum’s lengthy history of presenting music, bolstering concerts in the museum’s historic theater and throughout its galleries. He established a five-year partnership with the Arazzo Music Festival, presenting chamber music performances with accomplished early-career musicians, and revitalized a decades long partnership with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra through the Sunday Serenades series. He also built a substantive and eclectic Music in the Galleries series. This series presented performances with bassist Brandon López, cellist Samuel DeCaprio, vocalist Xenia Rubinos with Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist Zaccai Curtis and percussionist Marco Buccelli, Kyrgyz folk musician Aidai Kalmamatova, erhu player Chia-Yu Joy Lu, and Renaissance and Baroque music specialists Hideki Yamaya and Héloïse Degrugillier, among many others. In 2023, Adam also organized a performance with Natural Information Society (Joshua Abrams, Lisa Alvarado, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Jason Stein) in the museum’s theater and a performance installation across the galleries of Alvin Lucier's (Hartford) Memory Space with pioneering vocalist Joan La Barbara, The Daxophone Consort (Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom), Tongue Depressor (Henry Bidsey and Zach Rowden), Ron Kuivila, Emerson Jenisch, and Sam Boston.  

 

Prior to his arrival at the museum, Adam curated and produced a four-day retrospective festival with Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble at University of Hartford in 2019, culminating with a performance of Cellular Songs (2018). During the 2020–2021 academic year, he served as curator of the Institute of Contemporary American Music (ICAM) at the university and organized artist talks with Helga Davis, Tania León, Carlos Soto, Audra Wolowiec, Charmaine Lee & Zach Rowden, Matmos, Guillermo Galindo, and Sarah Hennies, as well as a 2021 commissioning project and electroacoustic performance with trombonist Haim Avitsur.

 

As an artist, Adam has collaborated on performance-based work with artists, directors, and musicians including renowned director Robert Wilson, Dr. GoraParasit (Gintare Minelgaite), Dimitris Papaioannou, Zach Rowden, Baboo Liao, Miki Orihara, and Robert Black, among others. These projects and other solo ventures have been presented in more than a dozen countries at internationally recognized venues including The Watermill Center, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Teatrul Național Craiova, Cankarjev Dom, Platonov Arts Festival, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Print Screen Festival, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Boston University Art Galleries, Mengi Gallery, Ammerman Biennial Symposium on Art and Technology, Festival Cultural de Zacatecas, SEAMUS, and NYCEMF.

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Adam holds a BM in Composition and a MA in Music Research from Western Michigan University and an AD in Music Composition from The Hartt School at the University of Hartford. From 2016–2021, Adam taught electronic music, sound design, and sound art at the University of Hartford. Here he also served as director of Hartt Studio D, The Hartt School’s electronic composition laboratory, and was a recipient of the University’s 2021 Gordon Clark Ramsey Award for Creative Excellence in Teaching.