Cora Cahan, a longtime New York arts administrator, will join the Baryshnikov Arts Center as its new president and chief executive, the organization announced on Tuesday. Ms. Cahan will begin her tenure in mid-October.

Ms. Cahan, who had a career as a dancer before becoming the executive director of the Eliot Feld Ballet, has spent much of her career transforming neglected theaters into revitalized cultural spaces. After she and the choreographer Eliot Feld helped to transform a 1941 movie house into the Joyce Theater, she became the founding president of the New 42nd Street nonprofit organization where she spent 29 years reshaping a stretch of dilapidated Times Square theaters into a cultural hub. Under her tenure, the organization opened the family-oriented New Victory theater, the black-box theater the Duke and New 42nd Street Studios, which offers rehearsal and theater space for emerging artists. She stepped down as the organization’s chief in June.

Now Ms. Cahan will use her administrative expertise and her dance background to help Mikhail Baryshnikov, whom she’s known for 45 years and calls Misha, bring his multidisciplinary arts center into its next chapter.

“Of great interest to me is to go someplace created by somebody that I trust and admire beyond measure, which is Misha , and help him move it forward into not only the second half of the 21st century but beyond,” Ms. Cahan said in a phone interview.