One year ago, The 92nd Street Y, New York launched Roundtable, a new destination for online learning — a place where people with a voracious love of ideas can gather to deepen their knowledge, widen their perspectives, and get inspired by some of the world’s brightest thinkers. It was a natural evolution for 92NY, featuring courses led by some of the most beloved members of our longstanding intellectual community — including The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, 92NY Reel Pieces host Annette Insdorf, geopolitical expert Ralph Buultjens, and many more. Since then, 13,000 participants from all over the globe have signed up for 350 live, interactive courses led by 230 experts — including Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, world-renowned historians, award-winning chefs, and many more.
Inspired by 92NY’s 150-year history as a hub for New Yorkers who love to learn, Roundtable’s ambitions were big from the start — to create a platform where anyone, anywhere could get a world-class education in a subject that fascinated them. Heading into its second year, those ambitions are quickly scaling up to include exclusive new collaborations with some of the nation’s top cultural institutions.
In June, Roundtable introduces some of these new collaborations with a new series called Coffee with a Curator — intimate, curator-led previews of exhibits at museums like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, the Storm King Art Center in New York, and many others. Also in June, Emmy Award-winning travel expert Peter Greenberg takes the helm of a new series called Becoming the Smartest Traveler — giving participants expert tips on flights, accommodations, and solo trips for destinations around the world.
“In our first year, we found that the hunger for online learning is insatiable,” says Roundtable CEO Rolando Nunez Baza. “There are countless arts and culture organizations doing amazing work that want to tap into that hunger — but until now they haven’t had a platform to make their resources widely available to the public. We are that platform. People who can’t walk to the subway or hop on a plane to visit the Bronx Zoo, the American Shakespeare Center, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, or Storm King — they’ll get direct access to educators and curators from these institutions through Roundtable. It’s an incredibly exciting new chapter.”
No matter where you are, Roundtable connects you to a growing community of learners and world-class educators. Roundtable’s impact on 92NY’s global community has already been highly significant — and it’s just getting started.