Jordan Hayes saw their first Broadway show from the last row of the second balcony, borrowed binoculars, at age nine. The show was a revival of Rent. Their mother, a Bed-Stuy public school teacher, had saved for the tickets for three months. Hayes remembers the walk from the subway, the way the theater smelled, the absolute certainty they felt halfway through Act One that something about how they understood the city had permanently changed. They have been writing about that feeling — and trying to replicate it for readers — ever since.

Hayes grew up in Crown Heights, non-binary since before they had language for it, in a household where art was not a luxury but a survival strategy. Their father painted and taught at an afterschool program; their mother organized the annual block association talent show with the intensity of a Broadway stage manager. Hayes absorbed both approaches — the solitary discipline of making and the communal joy of sharing — and brought them to their journalism. They studied arts criticism and cultural studies at Brooklyn College, graduated on a Thursday, and had their first freelance piece accepted on the following Monday.

Over the next five years, Hayes became one of the most widely read arts writers in New York City’s independent press, covering everything from opening nights at the Met Opera to warehouse shows in Bushwick that had no website and no press materials. Their criticism is known for being formally rigorous without being exclusionary — they write for readers who care about the work regardless of whether they have institutional arts education. A piece they wrote about a queer Black experimental theater company in Fort Greene was included in a Columbia University course on contemporary cultural criticism.

“The question I always ask is: who is this for? Great art is never just for the people who can already afford to see it. When it reaches beyond its own audience, that’s when something real happens.”

At Made in NYC, Hayes covers the full spectrum of New York’s artistic life — Broadway and experimental theater, gallery shows and street art, film festivals and community screenings, music from Carnegie Hall to the back room at a bar in Ridgewood. They are particularly committed to covering artists from communities that are chronically underrepresented in mainstream arts media, and to criticism that treats accessibility as a value, not an afterthought.

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