10/29/2026
Save the date! We invite you to join us on Sunday, November 8th, from 3:00 - 5:00 pm, for an opening reception for STAGE LIGHT: Photographs of Dancers, Musicians and Performers by Stephanie Berger with a performance by Annamae Goldstein and Diego Garcia.
STAGE LIGHT: Photographs of Dancers, Musicians and Performers by Stephanie Berger
For over thirty years I have photographed dance, theatre, and music in New York City — as house photographer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, the Park Avenue Armory, Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Museum, and as a culture photographer for the New York Times. My work started as documentation: a record of the artists, companies, and productions that defined a particular moment in the city's cultural life.
Over time, the camera became something more than a record-keeping tool — it became a form of artistic exchange as well as documentation. Photographing artists over so many years is itself a kind of exchange, one that has let me see how artists, disciplines, and programs speak to one another across cultures and across time — and that seeing is inseparable from my own sensibility as the photographer behind the lens.
I look for the split second where stillness meets movement, and let composition, light, and timing shape it into its own image. The photographs are evidence of what happened on stage — but they're also my interpretation of it: the rhythm, the gesture, the light the audience may have felt but not quite seen.
Stage Light holds both concepts at once — the documentary and the artistic — as two sides of the same practice.
Stephanie Berger:
Stephanie Berger has spent more than 30 years photographing dance and live performance, working as house photographer for some of New York City's most important cultural institutions and for many years as a culture photographer for the New York Times. Before that, she climbed bridges for the NYC Department of Transportation, documenting infrastructure at risk. Her projects include the 52nd Street Project and her 2016 book, Merce Cunningham: Beyond the Perfect Stage, now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Dia Art Foundation, and MASS MoCA. She has lived in Piermont with her husband, Paul King, for 21 years, where she raised their sons, Jacob and Noah King, who attended the South Orangetown schools and now live in Brooklyn.
Annamae Goldstein:
Annamae Goldstein grew up in Blauvelt, where the South Orangetown music department gave her a creative refuge, and went on to study at Juilliard for 11 years beginning at age 11. She began playing with the New Jersey Symphony while still at conservatory and joined the Metropolitan Opera in 1990, where her 36 years have been thrilling, demanding, and at times far too stressful, while her career has also taken her to music festivals around the world. Now living in Piermont, where she raised her sons Owen and Sam Gould in the same schools she attended, she enjoys gardening, singing with the All Together Now chorus in Nyack, and walking her dog, Django, in the Tallman and Rockleigh woods.
Diego Garcia:
Colombian-born Diego Garcia is a conductor, cellist, and educator who has worked with conservatories, universities, orchestras, and festivals across the Americas and Europe. He is Artist Faculty in Cello and Conducting at NYU Steinhardt and Music Director of Orchestras at Dwight-Englewood School and the Thurnauer School of Music. He lives in Piermont with his wife, Annaliesa Place, and their daughters, Calima and Vera Garcia.
Alexis Starke
