Onassis ONX Celebrates Five Years of Bridging Art and Technology With a New Space

Launched in 2020 by the Onassis Foundation and NEW INC, the incubator of the New Museum, Onassis ONX Studio has evolved into one of New York’s leading hubs for artists working at the intersection of extended reality (X.R.), A.I. and performance. Closely connected to Onassis Stegi in Athens, the two organizations form a dynamic international channel for creative exchange within the broader Onassis Foundation ecosystem. In New York, Onassis ONX provides an accessible acceleration space for ambitious productions, while at Onassis Stegi—founded in 2010—the focus is on education and professional development, nurturing a rapidly expanding arts-and-technology scene. Rooted in Greece’s long tradition of theater and dramaturgy, this has inspired compelling intersections of theater, dance and technology.

To mark its fifth anniversary, Onassis ONX has announced its relocation from its original venue in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, just above the Onassis Foundation’s U.S. headquarters, to an expanded 6,000-square-foot space in the heart of Tribeca at 390 Broadway, which also houses PPOW and Matthew Brown Gallery. Set to open in January, the new facility will continue to operate as a hybrid residency, research lab and production studio, offering additional space for exhibitions and public programming that extend the reach of the work developed within the organization.

The new studio includes a motion-capture stage twice the size of the previous one, a three-wall seamless projection room designed for museum-scale installations and an expanded sound studio—four times larger than the original—equipped with a high-fidelity system for immersive sonic environments. It also features enhanced computational infrastructure, including a new server array designed to support A.I. and generative media.

“It’s been amazing to see how much interest, focus and support for art and technology has expanded in New York City and around the world,” Jazia Hammoudi, program director of Onassis ONX, told Observer ahead of the announcement. “It’s been a long journey for many of us, but witnessing this evolution now feels incredibly rewarding.”

Created as an arm of Onassis Culture—the cultural branch of Greece’s leading philanthropic organization, which has championed “aid, progress and development” since 1975—ONX quickly became central to the foundation’s mission as a cultural innovator and supporter of contemporary art. From the outset, the foundation has operated from a deeply humanist perspective, Hammoudi explained. “It’s an organization that takes its lead from artists rather than dictating from the top down, continually looking to understand what’s actually happening across the cultural and intellectual landscape. It’s about paying close attention to what artists and audiences are thinking about, interested in and in need of. That same responsiveness to artistic and technological innovation is what inspired the foundation’s expansion in both New York and Athens.”

At its core, ONX is first and foremost an accelerator. Its foundation lies in the production space, tools and technical consultation it provides—but beyond that, it functions as an aesthetic and intellectual incubator. “We offer extensive creative consultation and curatorial support to artists, so they’re not only producing work here but also developing its conceptual and public trajectory,” Hammoudi added. “An artist can come to ONX, build their work and we’ll help them find the right platform for it—whether that’s a festival, an exhibition within our own programs in New York or Athens, or through one of our partner institutions.” Onassis ONX also helps artists secure additional funding, either through internal seed grants and commissions or through its global network of partners.

Since its founding, ONX has supported an impressive roster of artists and collectives redefining the intersection of performance and technology, including LaJuné McMillian, Peter Burr, Stephanie Dinkins, Sutu (Stuart Campbell) and Jayson Musson. Projects developed at ONX often blur the boundaries between theater, gaming environments, installation and live performance—echoing the Onassis Foundation’s broader mission to explore the future of culture and human experience through technology.

“Our goal is to provide holistic support for artists working in new media because we recognize that many traditional museums and cultural institutions weren’t designed to meet their needs,” Hammoudi said. “Our work is twofold: to provide artists with the resources and infrastructure they need and to help institutions evolve into what 21st-century creativity actually looks like.”

ONX currently supports about 85 member artists worldwide who have full access to production facilities, seed grants, funding opportunities, internal open calls and ongoing staff consultation. This membership model ensures long-term, sustained support for artists working in new media. “We know that this kind of work takes time—and often requires many different minds and kinds of intelligence to bring to completion,” Hammoudi explained. “As advocates and field builders, we see these ongoing relationships with artists as essential to the growth and vitality of the field itself.”

The new space will also enable the organization to deepen and expand its global partnerships. As part of its mission as a field builder, Onassis ONX collaborates with international partners to develop residencies, exchange programs, fellowships, exhibitions, funding initiatives and distribution channels.

For example, Onassis ONX is a partner on Lincoln Center’s Collider Fellowship, runs a residency exchange with MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and maintains a core partnership with NEW INC, where artists track work within the ONX space. Looking ahead, Hammoudi said the goal is to continue expanding these partnerships to support a growing cohort of artists. “It’s important for us to maintain a deep, ongoing connection with our 85 member artists while also creating ways to offer short-term, project-based support to those who come to us with a specific challenge or need. This expansion allows us to do both.”

Notions of hybrid identity beyond biological, mythological and digital limits

Inaugurating Onassis ONX’s new space will be “TECHNE: Homecoming,” an exhibition uniting six visionary artists whose multimedia installations explore hybrid identity shaped through biological, mythological and digital kinships. “The show reflects our belief that technology can deepen the ways we connect—with one another, with our histories and with the stories we choose to tell about the future,” Hammoudi said.

The artist lineup embodies the kind of interdisciplinary, cross-knowledge collaboration the foundation has long supported, featuring works that range from Andrew Thomas Huang’s two-channel video installation and sculptural environment—rooted in a Buddhist folktale and informed by his collaborations with Björk and FKA Twigs—to Tamiko Thiel’s Atmos Sphaerae, a video installation tracing Earth’s atmospheric evolution from primordial void to Anthropocene through a poetic translation of molecular data into visual form that collapses conventional timescales. Meanwhile, Damara Inglês’s “phygital” installation reimagines the afterlife of Queen Nzinga of Angola through the lens of Cyber-Kimbandism, merging Bantu cosmology, A.I. and 3D design to position technology as both a spiritual conduit for ancestral connection and a tool of anti-colonial resistance.

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1599165" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/3.-Contact-Zone-Level-2_Hero-Image.png?w=970" alt="A surreal digital forest scene featuring a humanoid figure crouched near a vividly colored animal resembling a feline, both rendered in iridescent tones amid glowing trees." width="970" height="546" data-caption='Miriam Simun, <em>Contact Zone (Level 2)</em>, 2024. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy of the artist and Onassis ONX</span>’>

In a similar spirit, Natalia Manta’s looping animations, digital tombs and hybrid sculptures oscillate between the archaeological and the alien, provoking transhistorical reflections on human time across geographies and collective memory. Sister Sylvester presents Drinking Brecht, an experimental work of automated theater and performance-as-installation that functions as a Marxist-feminist laboratory. Finally, Miriam Simun’s generative three-channel projection Contact Zone Level 2 brings the Swiss Alps into collision with the artist’s own intestines beneath an A.I.’s gaze, continuously reconfiguring to explore the symbiosis between organic and artificial life—a visionary intersection of nature, technology and consciousness beyond human perception. “Technology becomes the mediator for this imagining, allowing a hybrid being—a new chimera—to emerge between nature and self. It’s a wild and deeply thought-provoking work,” Hammoudi said.

In each case, technology enables artists to construct more expansive worlds around their practice, extending the reach of their bodies and presence while dissolving the traditional genre boundaries that once defined art-making. “Those old taxonomies—this artist does that, that one does this—are becoming almost irrelevant,” Hammoudi noted, emphasizing that many of these works use digital tools not as spectacle but as instruments for expanding how we sense, perceive and experience reality—or move beyond its human limits.

The exhibition will be part of the annual Under the Radar Festival, which this year includes two Onassis ONX performances—We Have No Need of Other Worlds (We Need Mirrors) by Graham Sack and ¡Harken! by Modesto Flako Jimenez—as well as MAMI, a mainstage production conceived and directed by Mario Banushi and commissioned by Onassis Stegi. Together, these works underscore the foundation’s multifaceted support for artists working at the intersection of performance and new technology—an ever-expanding field as creators increasingly experiment with digital embodiment, exploring performance, the shifting boundaries between analog and digital and what it means for the body to exist in real time and space within contemporary digital culture.

Balancing studio production and public programming

Looking ahead, Onassis ONX will continue to balance its mission of providing a dedicated workspace for artists with a growing commitment to public engagement. Beginning in 2026, ONX will host two in-studio exhibitions each year—one in January and another in the fall—along with quarterly public programs developed in collaboration with organizations such as NEW INC, Pioneer Works, Rhizome and Lincoln Center. The foundation also plans to continue its major annual off-site exhibition each June, following last year’s presentation at Tribeca Immersive. “This model allows us to keep the studio primarily a development space while maintaining a consistent public presence through exhibitions and thought-leadership events announced on our website and newsletter,” Hammoudi said.

In Athens, the focus remains educational, with ongoing incubation programs such as ONX Futures and the annual A.I. Summer School each July. The Athens space will also present an ONX showcase in May and contribute to the foundation’s broader cultural calendar, which includes the Borderline Festival in April. The foundation also produces Plásmata, its large-scale digital art biennial in Pedion tou Areos Park. Held every two years, it is one of the few outdoor digital art biennials in the world, combining large-scale installations, performances and music with works by both Greek and international artists, including recent participants such as John Fitzgerald, Jiabao Li, William Kentridge and Johan Bourgeois.

Ultimately, ONX’s mission—across both New York and Athens—is to expand the understanding of art and technology not only as mediums but as frameworks for examining how we live today. As traditional genres continue to dissolve, the foundation remains committed to supporting artists working at these frontiers, where art and life increasingly intersect.