Our Story

Off The Lane’s Goals: Support artists. Develop careers. Create bold work. Build community.

Off The Lane was founded in 2019 by artist and entrepreneur Kristal Mallookis, who saw a need for more accessible resources and meaningful connection within New York City’s creative community. Drawing from her experience building Mustard Lane, a staffing agency employing artists, Kristal created OTL to help artists navigate the professional and personal challenges of building a creative career.

Since then, OTL has grown into a connected community of artists, mentors, advisors, producers, and audiences. Our programming has evolved alongside the needs of the people we serve, but our core belief has remained the same: artists thrive when they have access to both opportunity and community.

Today, OTL’s work centers around five interconnected programs:

The Mentorship Program connects emerging, collegiate, and recently graduated artists with working professionals for individualized guidance, practical resources, and community over the course of 8-10 weeks.

BOOST provides free, career-centric goal accountability and career counseling sessions for newly established artists in NYC, helping them turn creative ideas into concrete, sustainable plans over the course of 4-6 months.

ColLab gives NYC artists the resources and producing support to experiment with immersive, interactive, and interdisciplinary new work and present that work in the Off The Lane performance loft.

Community Events create welcoming, low-barrier opportunities for artists and audiences to meet, learn, collaborate, and celebrate together.

School Partnerships offers collaborative workshop experiences in NYC that allows high school and college groups to experience professional auditions, callbacks, and rehearsal processes.

Together, these programs create a creative ecosystem of support: artists can find community, develop professionally, build relationships, experiment creatively, and share their work all within the same organization.