Polish Cultural Institute New York, established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission to the United States serving under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. The mission of the Polish Cultural Institute New York is to share Polish heritage, history and art with American audiences, and to promote Poland’s contributions to the success of world culture. The Institute does so through initiating, supporting and promoting collaboration between Poland and the United States in the areas of visual art, design, film, theater, dance, literature, music, and in many other aspects of intellectual and social life. The Institute’s main task to ensure Polish participation in the programming of America’s most important cultural institutions as well as in large international initiatives.

The Institute works with renowned cultural and academic centers and opinion leaders operating on the American market. Its main partners include such prestigious organizations as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Modern Art, PEN American Center, the Poetry Society of America, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Harvard Film Archive, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Julliard School of Music, the New Museum, the Jewish Museum, La MaMa E.T.C. and many others. For more than fifteen years, it has presented Americans the achievements of outstanding Polish artists, including the filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Skolimowski; the writers Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Szymborska; the composers Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski and Mikolaj Gorecki; theater artists Krystian Lupa, Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor; the visual artists Krzysztof Wodiczko, Katarzyna Kozyra, Alina Szapocznikow and many other important figures in the arts. The Institute initiates and actively participates in debates around the humanities in the broad sense, including those concerning history and the today’s most important social and political occurrences.

Staff

Jakub Świetlik
Director

Jakub Świetlik is a project manager and cultural producer with extensive experience working with both Polish and international institutions. A graduate in Sociology and Cultural Studies from the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw, his academic research focused on the dynamics of popular culture.

He has been involved with leading Polish theatre companies such as TR Warszawa and the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw, working with directors including Grzegorz Jarzyna, Krystian Lupa, René Pollesch, Monika Strzępka and Krzysztof Warlikowski. As a production and tour manager, he coordinated guest performances at major venues worldwide, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Royce Hall at UCLA. During the third edition of the Warsaw Central Festival, he oversaw touring productions by Christoph Marthaler and Christoph Schlingensief.

As an independent researcher, photographer and producer Jakub collaborated with the Bavarian State Opera before joining the Polish Cultural Institute in Berlin, where he focused on performing arts programming. In Germany, he also partnered with the Goethe-Institut and Lollapalooza Festival, further broadening his professional scope.

His photography has been recognized internationally, with shortlistings for the Verzasca Photo Festival Award (Switzerland) and the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Humanity prize.

Before relocating to New York, Jakub spent six years with the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.

Małgorzata Szum
Deputy Director

Małgorzata Szum an arts and cultural project manager and cultural diplomacy practitioner, who is dedicated to promoting Polish culture internationally. She is also a PR, media and communications specialist as well as a theatre critic, and author of texts and publications on theater, British and Anglo-Saxon culture, and contemporary drama.

She holds an MA, with honors, in Cultural Studies from the Faculty of Polish Philology at the University of Łódź, with a specialization in Theatre Studies. Her master’s thesis was titled, “The Poetics of Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Structural Elements of His Late Plays.” 

She was also awarded a Chevening Scholarship, the international scholarship and fellowship program funded by the British government, which enables outstanding emerging leaders to study in the UK.  She completed postgraduate studies in Arts Administration at the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City, University of London. During her studies, she collaborated on educational projects at the Royal Court Theatre in London (as part of the Royal Court New Writing Education Scheme) and also completed a ‘secondment’- an individual internship in the Literary Department of the National Theatre in London.

Małgorzata’s professional path spans arts administration, cultural diplomacy, and theater criticism. She has worked at the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, heading the theatre division in the Arts Department, and later the International Relations Department.  When the Ministry of Culture launched a scheme to promote new playwriting, she served on the Artistic Committee of the National Competition for the Staging of Contemporary Polish Plays.

During her diplomatic career, she worked as a Deputy Director and Acting Director at the Polish Cultural Institute in London (2001-2005), where she successfully launched the first editions of the KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival in London (since 2002) working alongside a dedicated team.  She also organized a series of events dedicated to the work of Jerzy Grotowski, in collaboration with the Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław.

From 2009 to 2014, she was Cultural Counsellor at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, D.C., working on comprehensive annual projects. These included a series of events in the United States during the bicentennial celebrations of Fryderyk Chopin’s birth in 2010. She organized cultural events during the Polish Presidency of the European Union in 2011, and collaborated with the American Film Institute on Polish presentations at the AFI European Union Film Showcase from 2009 to 2014.

Małgorzata worked at the National Theatre in Warsaw (Narodowy Theatre) as Head of the Literary Department (2006-2009) and the Communications Department (2014-2021), lending her assistance to the progamme celebrating the 250^th Anniversary of the Polish National Theatre during the Jubilee Season 2014/2015. She was also headed the Marketing and Communications Department at the Ateneum Theater in Warsaw (2021-2022) and was press spokesperson, PR and media chief specialist at the Press Office of the Mazovian Institute of Culture (2023-2025).

As an author and theatre critic, she has contributed to theatre, film, and cultural magazines including Dialog, Teatr, Didaskalia, Scena and Konteksty.

Anna Perzanowska
Music Curator 

Anna Perzanowska has an extensive background in arts programming and management, cultural diplomacy, and project development. She holds an MA in Ethnomusicology and a BA in Business Administration. Anna is a Co-Founder and Senior Artist Manager & Producer at Momentum Artists, an innovative artist management and producing agency, offering international representation and special project development services to a boutique roster of distinguished artists from around the globe. Anna has worked on presenting events and concerts in partnership with such diverse institutions as Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Philharmonic, The Santa Fe Opera, Bard Music Festival, Luminato Festival, World Music Festival Chicago, Symphony Space, The Morgan Library, Juilliard, Yale University, MoMA, (Le) Poisson Rouge, National Sawdust, Joe’s Pub and many more. Over the years, she has collaborated with dozens of exceptional composers, artists, and ensembles, among them JACK Quartet, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Silesian String Quartet, and Arte dei Suonatori to name a few. Music has been Anna’s passion since her early years when at the age of five she started playing piano and cello. Her broad music education, interests, and experience led her to work on projects across varying genres and formats. Anna worked at the Institute in 2007-2018 and returned in 2020.

Bartek Remisko
Humanities & Polish-Jewish Programming

Bartek Remisko is a trained translator and interpreter from English and French into Polish with an MA in Applied Linguistics from Warsaw University. He is also a teacher of foreign languages including Polish as a Foreign Language. Bartek holds an MA in International Economic & Political Relations from Warsaw School of Economics and Sciences Po Paris. His two areas of interest are Polish-Jewish past and present as well as Modern & Contemporary Art Museums and their operations, and he holds two Masters (DESS and DEA) in this field from Université Paris VIII. He also studied Curatorial Studies at the Art History Institute at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and Art Administration at School of Professional Studies at NYU. He worked in European Commission and European Parliament in Brussels. He also worked at the Pompidou Center in Paris, Orange Poland in Warsaw, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. Most recently Bartek has been an independent cultural worker in New York City for a couple of years in various positions in the industry: independent curator, art administrator, publicist, and cultural producer, as well as VIP assistant at The Armory Show, TEFAF New York and Frieze New York, consultant at Residency Unlimited, Associate Director at Green Point Projects, Managing Director at Beach64retreat and Artistic Director at Kosciuszko Projects, where in 2019 he curated critically acclaimed first American retrospective exhibition “The Many Faces of Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980)”. Bartek worked at the Institute in 2011-2015 and returned in 2020.

Izabela Gola
Visual Arts and Design Curator

Izabela worked as an art exhibitions coordinator for the cultural programming department of the French Institute Alliance Française in New York. Izabela’s role involved managing exhibition production logistics, as well as oversight and execution of art installations. Izabela also worked for the head registrar at MoMA PS1, where she contributed to creation of a new inventory and archive system of the permanent art collection. Izabela is a visual artist specializing in multidisciplinary art environments which employ video, sculpture, oil painting, and elements of interior design. She was recipient of the Kosciuszko Foundation Tuition Scholarship (2014) while enrolled in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Hunter College in New York. Izabela earned her MFA degree with concentration in Video Art and Combined Media in 2015. Izabela Gola joined the Institute in 2016.

Ignacy Frederik Heringa
Film and Performing Arts Curator

Frederik is a Dutch-Polish filmmaker, composer, and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Belgium and raised in various countries due to his parents’ diplomatic career, he brings a distinctly multicultural perspective to his work and feels at home in the melting pot that is New York City. He holds a degree in Film and Media Studies from Utrecht University and studied classical composition at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. He has worked across creative production roles—director, editor, videographer, photographer, lighting designer, and actor—primarily in the commercial sector, with clients such as MAC Cosmetics, U.S. Soccer, Domestika and The Los Angeles Times. He is also the founder of Big Other Productions and is actively developing narrative film work. His most ambitious independent project to date is “Affair of Honor”, a 45-minute narrative adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Bear”. A passionate advocate for cinema and theater, he is committed to promoting Polish and Eastern European film and performing arts through thoughtfully curated programming, and international collaboration, with the intent of amplifying regional voices on the global cultural stage.