March is Women’s History Month!
Celebrate the accomplishments of women, past and present, in Hudson Square!
Marina Abramovic
Women in art
Marina Abramović, the self-proclaimed grandmother of performance art, once lived at 54 King Street. Her work explores the human body, endurance, and feminism.
You may recognize her from her collaborations with Uwe Laysiepen and her 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, performance at the MoMA, titled “The Artist is Present”, in which she sat immobile in the museum’s atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.
Many female artists have contributed to the artistic vibe of Hudson Square, including: Tomashi Jackson (ArtBridge at 550 Washington), WIP Collaborative (Restorative Ground on King St), Gera Luz (Mural at 375 Hudson St), Katie Merz (Mural at 181 Varick) and Claudia Ravaschiere (Installation at Freeman Plaza East)
Hudson Square is also home to Molly Goldfarb NYC-based independent studio artist working primarily in acrylic and digital painting.
Anita Rogers, a British artist and entrepreneur, owns Anita Rogers Gallery, located at 494 Greenwich Street, which represents a diverse roster of emerging, mid-career and posthumous artists.
Golnar Khosrowshahi
Women in music
Madonna filmed her first music video “Everybody” at Paradise Garage, which was located at 84 King , now the current home of 77 King street’s newly constructed condominiums. Paradise Garage also hosted other famous female artists such as Gloria Gaynor, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, and many others.
Golnar Khosrowshahi founded Reservoir Media, located at 75 Varick Street, which is an independent music company that is the first U.S.-based female-founded and publicly traded independent music company.
Khosrowshahi was named to Billboard’s Power List in 2020 and 2022 and was honored as one of Billboard’s Most Powerful Female Executives in 2017, 2018, and 2019. In 2022, Billboard announced she would receive the Executive of the Year Award at their annual Women In Music Awards.
Its publishing catalog includes historic pieces written and performed by greats like Joni Mitchell, Sheryl Crow, Lady Gaga, Camila Cabello, Cardi B (who got her start at S.O.B.’s down the road) and more.
S.O.B. ‘s boasts a lengthy roster of women musicians who have performed on its stages, including some of their very first concerts, such as Celia Cruz, Megan Thee Stallion, Queen Latifah, and Rita Ora.
Marie Mattingly Meloney
Women in Journalism
Marie Mattingly Meloney was the editor of The Delineator, a women’s sewing periodical, printed from 1873-1937 in the Butterick Building, now 161 Avenue of the Americas. She was one of the leading women journalists of her time and was a close friend and confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Robin Sparkman was named the President and CEO of ProPublica in 2021, at 155 6th Avenue. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. She was previously the founding CEO of StoryCorps, and spent more than two decades as a reporter and editor.
Cynthia King Vance is the Interim CEO for New York Public Radio (NYPR) at 160 Varick Street. Vance has a background and executive experience in both media and education.Vance served as Chief Financial Officer and Business Development head of UK Gold Broadcasting, and helped establish The Community Channel for UK voluntary organizations.
She also created and teaches the Entrepreneurship course at Hunter College.
Melanie Igwe
Women in STEM
Melanie Igwe is the CEO and Founder of DrugViu, a company that consolidates various medical records all into once place for medical teams, and matches you to the right clinical trials and identifies better treatment options for those with autoimmune diseases. Prior to DrugViu, Melanie was a founder of a digital health startup.
Dr. Maria Luisa Pineda is the co-founder and CEO of Envisagenics, a company at 101 Avenue of the Americas, that develops therapeutics to cure diseases caused by RNA splicing errors. She is a biologist with over 10 years of research experience and was awarded an endowment of $2 million dollars from the Goizueta Foundation and an NIH fellowship with the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC U*STAR) program.
Bozena Korczak is Chief Translational Research Officer at Orion Biotechnology, a company that is developing next-generation G Protein-Coupled Receptor (GPCR)-targeted therapeutics for the treatment of cancer and other serious diseases.
She is a translational science executive, with more than 20 years of experience across multiple therapeutic areas including oncology, inflammatory diseases, dermatology, cardiology, and infectious diseases, she bridges the gap between researchers and the general public.
Korczak graduated from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland and performed pioneering post doctorate work on cloning gene coding for large receptor proteins. She has six patents for her work.
