NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Jane Moss, who has guided Lincoln Center’s artistic programming for nearly 30 years, will step down in August, she announced on Friday.

Moss, 67, said in an interview that the coronavirus pandemic presented the opportunity to make a decision she had been considering even before the outbreak, which has wiped out the cultural calendar for months and threatens to curtail the center’s budget and ambitions for years to come.

“What this pause created was the space,” she said. “And now is the obvious time.”

The center, America’s largest performing arts complex, is best known for its constituent organizations, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet. But it also presents over 200 of its own events each year, through festivals and series that include Great Performers, the summertime Mostly Mozart Festival and the White Light Festival each fall.

Since 1992 Moss has overseen them, first as vice president of programming and then as artistic director. Her background was primarily in the theater world, and she broadened what had been an often stodgy classical concert season at the center to encompass experiences as innovative and memorable as anything on New York’s cultural scene.

Participatory events, like David Lang’s chorus for 1,000 singers, “the public domain,” filled the center’s vast plaza. Intimate performances of Brahms’s “German Requiem” mixed the Berlin Radio Choir among audience members walking through the Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

White Light, founded in 2010, gave the center’s fall slate a newly fashionable brand, tinged with New Age spirituality. And Mostly Mozart got considerably livelier. For its orchestral concerts, Moss had the stage pulled forward in Avery Fisher — now David Geffen — Hall, creating a more immersive audience environment that will be made permanent when the hall’s coming renovation is complete.

Moss anticipated that until large gatherings are possible again, Lincoln Center — which as a presenter is largely free of commitments to a given space or ensemble — could explore quasi-installation, pop-up and small-scale events, even down to performances for a single musician and a single audience member.

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