We are shaken and deeply saddened to have lost our beloved friend, colleague, collaborator, mentor, and star producer, Lanie Zipoy. Her devastating loss is felt throughout our extended Recent Cutbacks family, which represents only a fraction of the multitudinous NYC artist community of which Lanie was an indispensable and central force.

We reached out to her on a hunch in 2016 to help with some new projects and grow our company. We quickly hit it off, and the rest is RCB history. She innately understood and championed our aesthetic of serious reverence for the silliest, dumbest idea—immediately picking up what we were putting down. She was the best possible person for us, and we will be forever grateful for her generous gifts of insight, inspiration, passion, and wisdom.

Among too many things to mention, she helped bring us to APAP, connected us with the Alden Theatre in Virginia, facilitated our Audible Original commission, helped us hone pitches, found us grant opportunities, built invaluable relationships with new spaces, organizations and collaborators, and just checked in when it had been awhile.

Lanie was many, many things, but most of all she was a fierce advocate of artists and a masterful connector of networks. Despite being one of four people running our company, she in fact led numerous other full lives as a producer, writer, director, performer, curator, liaison, advocate, consultant, athlete . . . the list goes on.

Lanie’s excellence and prolific dedication to seemingly endless projects was one of her many superpowers. She was so many things to so many people, but was indisputably a bright light for everyone who knew her. She was open-hearted, joyful, brave, supportive, goofy, and brilliant. We are so lucky to have known her, been guided by her, and learned from her.

To have lost her so soon is an unspeakable tragedy. None of us will ever be the same. Our hearts go out particularly to her sister, Kat, and her family.

We celebrate Lanie’s life and spirit, mourn with her expansive community, and lift her up in creative energy and love.