Stanford Live’s 2025-26 season, Amplifying Voices, which opened Oct. 3 and runs through May 20, includes more than 70 performances by artists spanning music, dance, theater, spoken word, film, and comedy. It’s the first season curated by Iris Nemani, who was appointed the McMurtry Family Director of Stanford Live in 2024. Many of the artists performing across Stanford’s venues will also engage directly with students through workshops, panel discussions, and masterclasses.

“The opportunity to be close to students is what brought me to Stanford,” Nemani said. “We’re graduating future leaders in many different fields. I fundamentally believe that the arts are critical to a healthy society, and if we can center the arts in who students are as leaders, this world has a chance to do great things.”

Here, Nemani talks about the season’s lineup, upcoming campus collaborations, and the community-building power of a shared, live experience. 

How would you describe the new season, and what was on your mind as you were putting it together?

We opened with Lucía in the Studio at Bing, a young jazz singer I saw in New York a year ago and fell in love with her voice. It felt good to start with this young woman on a university campus and really lean into the idea that we are a place for discovery, a place for emerging talent to have an opportunity.

In putting together the season, I was guided by this idea of “amplifying voices,” of thinking about the diversity of the students here on campus and where they come from. I wanted to make sure that the artists we’re bringing to our stages reflected the communities that I saw here. What guided me was, how do I give the gift of this place to the artists I think should be here, and also reflect our audiences and what they’re interested in? So it’s a diverse, eclectic season, with a little bit of everything, but not too little – just enough that people feel like they have a good meal’s worth of artistic offerings. 

What’s special about presenting performing arts in an academic setting?

Presenting is one piece of what we do, but the magic, the special sauce, is the opportunity for deepening engagement with students through things like master classes – inviting Verbier festival Chamber Orchestra to do a residency where they are teaching and the students are performing for them. It’s an incredible gift.

It’s remarkable how many computer science students are also classical violinists and pianists. The talent here is high, and so is interest. So that’s exciting to me. I still have work to do to figure out how to make our performance spaces welcoming to students and let them know that we are open for them to come at any time. So we are trying things like posting on social channels: “If your head is exploding from too much stress, come see a show tonight.”

How often do performers engage directly with students and the Stanford community?

We try to put a commitment to community engagement into every contract, and approximately 75% of our artists agree to do a masterclass for students or some other kind of engagement. For instance, we had the jazz ensemble Artemis for a Sunday afternoon performance at Bing, and then they did a K-12 student matinee for kids from Ravenswood and Redwood City schools on Monday, and a masterclass that evening with jazz students in the Department of Music. The Australian circus company Circa held a public performance on Nov. 1 and 2, and a K-12 matinee the next day, and they’re also teaching a circus masterclass on campus at Roble gym. And we partnered with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research to have Jodi Kantor, a New York Times journalist, come to speak at Bing, and the next morning, she had breakfast with students. So there are many, many opportunities. 

What are some other collaborations you’re working on across campus?

We do a lot with the department of music, and I’m very interested in partnering across departments and schools, with faculty or research scientists – anybody whose work might have a connection with the work the artists are doing. We have a terrific Italian multimedia company called fuse* coming with a dance piece called Dokk, which has technology integrated into the performance driven by data from various sources, including from the cosmos. The members of the company will be connecting with institutes on campus, including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). And Risa Wechsler, professor of particle physics and astrophysics, will be hosting a post-show talk with the company.

And then there’s our partnership with Athletics. I think there’s a lot of crossover between athletics and the arts. Both are about that 10,000 hours or more committed to your craft, all leading up to a particular moment in time. The beauty of supporting each other on campus is that we are both interested in a shared, live experience, and we know how to welcome people into spaces. We saw that with the Coldplay concert. The pride of place was pretty incredible. We want everyone to feel that pride of community, and for students to feel that the stadium and all of the sports venues are theirs, in the same way that Frost and Bing are theirs.

What else are you excited about this season?

We have three plays from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. They’re an hour long. They’re relevant, current storytelling, and I'm hoping they are really going to speak to students. The first one coming up in November is called Burnout Paradise, and it’s four actors, each of them on a treadmill. They run on the treadmills the entire hour. One of them is cooking a three-course meal from scratch for two people in the audience. One of them is writing a grant. One of them is getting dressed. It’s really about this world that we live in now, and how much we keep adding on, and the burnout that we are all feeling. We’re working with Athletics to get the treadmills. That will be a good student show, and I’m hoping to get a bunch of the athletes to see it and just have some fun. I’m hoping that for all of us, actually – that we can all go and just have a good time.