Anime NYC 2026 – Screenings, Gaming, Cosplay & More!

by Young · 08/30/2026

Anime NYC is back for 2026, a four day convention featuring the latest anime screenings, voice actors, panels of your favorite anime and manga, plus much more! Taking place at the Jacob Javits Center at the Hudson Yards neighborhood in Manhattan, it’s an area easily accessible via public transportation.

There are roughly 4 major areas:

Main floor – Merch & food stalls + Artist Alley
Panels and Stages – Discussions, screenings and performances
Gaming – Free2Play games & Play NYC Indy Game Developers
Destination Cosplay – Meetups, photo backdrops and cosplay repairs

MAIN FLOOR – MERCH

The main floor is now home to all merch shops and Artists Alley. Although they’re theoretically in their own sections, the open floor plan makes it hard to differentiate between shops reselling someone else’s goods from professional artists who represent their own work. It takes some effort to find what you’re looking for, but if you’re looking to buy something (merch, artwork, food) or possibly score free swag, it’s in this area here.

The main food stalls (with mostly Japanese fare) are found at the east end of Javits. It’s an easy section to navigate to, given the natural separation from the huge amount of space.

STAGES – ALL THINGS ANIME

Haikyu! panel — *^{Click image to enlarge}*

Panels and stages host anything related to industry, from anime screenings to Q&A’s and special industry guests. Just be prepared to go early and wait for the most popular titles; crowded lines will snake around several times like for the Haikyu!!! panel that feature the Japanese voice actor of Kenma (Nekoma’s volleyball setter), Kaji Yuki and producer, Hibiki Saito.

GAMING

The gaming area is similar to the main floor, but with video games. There’s a huge section of free-to-play video games like the Taiko drumming game to Dance Dance Revolution, plus a gaming competition area set up by Citi Gaming, Ricchi Mahjong’s learn to play mahjong area, as well as Play NYC’s professional game developers. This offers you a chance to not only play arcade-type games, but see upcoming development of indie games. As you wander around however, it (once again) isn’t easy to differentiate between commercially available stuff from the game creators because of the open floor plan. Some kind of border (rope, carpet or even open space) would have been helpful here.

DESTINATION COSPLAY

All cosplay happenings take place in the newly dubbed Destination Cosplay. Here you can find individual backdrops for impromptu photo sessions, scheduled meetups for group pictures of your favorite anime and the Paladins of Cosplay repair center that can help fix up any booboos you might unexpectedly experience.

Coverage of Anime NYC will be linked below with new articles posted if the status is ONGOING. So please check back for more until they are COMPLETE.