Live from Lincoln Center


Live from Lincoln Center is a seventeen-time Emmy Award-winning series that has broadcast notable performances from the Lincoln Center in New York City on PBS since 1976. The program airs between six and nine times per season. Episodes of Live from Lincoln Center feature Lincoln Center's resident artistic organizations, most notably the New York Philharmonic. Funding for the series is currently made possible by major grants from the Robert Wood Johnson 1962 Charitable Trust, Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum, the Robert and Renee Belfer Family Foundation, the MetLife Foundation, Mercedes T. Bass, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

History

Live from Lincoln Center premiered on PBS on January 30, 1976. Since its premiere, the series has presented performances by the world's greatest performing artists. Some of its most notable regular performers include Audra McDonald, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Leonard Bernstein, Itzhak Perlman, George Balanchine, Isaac Stern, Nathan Lane, James Galway, Billy Porter, Zubin Mehta, James Naughton, Kurt Masur, Kristin Chenoweth, Jason Isbell, Beverly Sills, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Emma Thompson, Joan Sutherland, Josh Groban, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patina Miller, the New York City Ballet, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the American Ballet Theatre, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Opera.
Martin Bookspan served as the program announcer from the premiere of Live from Lincoln Center until his retirement in 2006, at which point Fred Child took over. On-camera hosts throughout the broadcast's history have included Dick Cavett, Hugh Downs, Sam Waterston, Garrick Utley, Patrick Watson, and Beverly Sills. Most recently, the host position has been filled by Alan Alda, Alec Baldwin, Lesley Stahl, and currently, Audra McDonald.
The show was originally developed in the mid-1970s by John Goberman, who served as executive producer from 1976 until 2011. In 2012, current Executive Producer Andrew Carl Wilk took over. Through 2012, the show was, in fact, live.
Through Goberman and Wilk's leadership, Live from Lincoln Center has gone on to win 17 Emmy Awards, 2 George Foster Peabody Awards, and several other accolades over its time on PBS. The current team of directors for the program is made up of Habib Azar, Dana Calderwood, Alex Coletti, Matthew Diamond, Brad Fuss, Annette Jolles, Lonny Price, Alan Skog, Glenn Weiss, and Andrew Carl Wilk. Kirk Browning is credited as the longest-running director of the series, contributing to the production of 185 episodes, and winning two Primetime Emmys as well as two Daytime Emmys. The show's full-time production team, led by Wilk, is composed of Douglas Chang, Kristy Geslain, Danielle Schiffman, Daisy Placeres, Gillian Campbell, and Nick Palm.

Awards

Notable broadcasts