After leaving the NYSF, he served as executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater from 1985 until he retired in 2013, where (with Gregory Mosher, then with Andre Bishop) he oversaw over 150 productions.

Gersten grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in a traditional Jewish immigrant household, crowded with relatives, his father Jacob holding the position of secretary at the local synagogue.

He transitioned into special services after attending a performance on a base of Macbeth featuring the theater stars Maurice Evans (a Captain) and Dame Judith Anderson.

Following his first professional gig, Gersten joined the Actor's Lab in Los Angeles, where he met his future colleague and co-producer, Joseph Papp.

This began a long partnership during which Papp and Gersten established the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) at the old Astor Library downtown while presenting a series of significant productions.

Significant dramatists such as Liz Swados, David Rabe, Sam Shepard, Michael Bennett, Richard Foreman and John Guare as well as major stage stars including James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Sam Waterston Edward Herrmann and Al Pacino, George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst (not to mention the visual artist Paul Davis), got their first national attention at the NYSF.

Notable productions during the Papp/Gersten era include an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hair, That Championship Season, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, Streamers, Buried Child and the crowning achievement of the NYSF during this period: the musical: A Chorus Line.

In what he has described as a ‘eureka moment’ [2] he found a way to free the New York Shakespeare Festival and later the Lincoln Center Theater from dependency on commercial producers when moving a show to Broadway.

Through this innovative approach to underwriting production, beginning with moving Two Gentlemen of Verona to Broadway in 1971, (and particularly with the success of A Chorus Line), the fortunes of the New York Shakespeare Festival grew enormously.

[2] After leaving Zoetrope, Gersten was recruited by Radio City Music Hall to serve as their Vice President to produce live original content.

Gersten, at the time working for Alexander Cohen on Broadway and teaching as an adjunct professor of theater administration at Columbia University, was invited to act as a consultant on the board.

For almost twenty years, Mr. Gersten and Mr. Bishop produced an award-winning series of top shelf theatrical productions, sparing no expense to achieve the most exacting artistic results.

[6] [7] Bernard Gersten produced over 150 productions at LCT, including a revival of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves and premiere of Six Degrees of Separation, Wendy Wasserstein’s Sisters Rosenzweig, Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, Ngema's Sarafina, David Mamet’s Speed the Plow, Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and a revival of South Pacific.

[3][6][7] Prior to retirement from LCT, Gersten helped implement the fundraising, design, and construction of the new Claire Tow Theater atop the Vivian Beaumont.