There was once a time when a performance career in New York progressed with, if not security, at least a path. An emerging playwright, director, or choreographer could hone their craft in a subsidized rehearsal space, apply for a residency somewhere in or near the city, or join a lab devoted to original works. Getting a single peer-reviewed grant, even a tiny one, would lead to others—each award conferring further legitimacy, bringing the artist to the attention of venues and large foundations. Money permitted more complex organizational structures, like companies and collectives, to form. In the happiest cases, a company could establish long-term funding relationships and receive predictable year-in, year-out operating support, thus becoming an institution, which could, in turn, offer its own new-work labs and programs. The cycle continued—or, at least, it did.
In the past half decade, whole strata of this intricate New York support system have been smashed. First, there was a drip-drip-drip of crisis: as costs everywhere rose, city, state, and federal monies faded away once COVID-era bailout efforts came to an end. According to a forthcoming study by the service organization A.R.T./New York, post-pandemic audiences for nonprofit theatre remain down eleven per cent, and, just in the year from 2022 to 2023, corporate giving dipped eighty per cent. Consequently, we’ve lost directing labs, nearby retreat centers for theatre and dance, and support spaces dedicated to new writing. There has been less ferment, less activity, less art. Already, financially strapped venues are producing far fewer shows—according to the Times, in the past five years, the number of Off Broadway productions eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards has dropped by half.
And then, when the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small. There were deep program and operational budget cuts at the Public Theatre, for instance, and Playwrights Horizons, where such critically acclaimed productions as Michael R. Jackson’s “Strange Loop” and David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” premièred, lost underwriting for new play commissioning, as well as general operating support. The tiny rooms where such shows develop got hit, too. “It seemed like everybody lost their subsidized rehearsal space funding from Mellon at the same time,” Risa Shoup, a co-executive director from A.R.T./New York, told me.
Mellon and Duke overhauled their giving goals in accidental lockstep, with many of their changes hitting simultaneously in 2024. Longtime observers of the granting scene describe Ford’s lessening interest in connecting with performing arts organizations in New York—“I find them to be inaccessible in terms of having a conversation in terms of cultivation,” one New York program head told me—though this characterization has been contested by the foundation itself. Despite the timing, these shifts and defundings were not inspired by the incoming Trump Administration; they were set in motion, in some cases, years beforehand—it’s only a coincidence that they amplify the Administration’s fund-pulling chaos. I have heard these three foundations described as ecologies unto themselves. The pivoting of just one from its historical patterns of giving would be seismic; the pivot of all three at once has been cataclysmic.
One major consequence has been that several service organizations and granting initiatives—technically regranters, intermediaries who disburse monies from umbrella donors—have been forced to shut down or to retire grant programs. In late 2024, the National Dance Project and the National Theatre Project announced that Mellon was “concluding their decades-long funding arc” and the organizations, in their current form, would end. The MAP Fund, which in the past fifteen years or so was largely sponsored by Mellon and Duke, was, until recently, one of the country’s longest-serving regranters. In the years since its founding in 1988, MAP, originally called the Multi-Arts Production Fund, assembled panels to read tens of thousands of open-call applications, leading to the support of around twenty-five hundred artists and ensembles—including Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, and Anna Deavere Smith. With its regranting function zeroed out by both of its key donors so close together, this vital support system is no more. (MAP still nominally exists, though it has been reduced to its last surviving program, a coaching and peer-gathering initiative.)
Those fifteen years of collaboration did not protect MAP. In fact, longevity seems to have become a liability. For twelve years, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council operated a dance residency called Extended Life that provided basic-income stipends to mid-career choreographers and was directly funded by Mellon. In 2024, L.M.C.C. lost around two million dollars after Mellon chose not to renew its grant, and Extended Life, too, was forced to close.
Organizations did have warning. In 2023, Duke told around two dozen of its longtime beneficiaries—including MAP, Creative Capital, Theatre Communications Group, National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures—that it would begin “sunsetting” its support throughout the next few years. The defunding in December still came as a shock, however, since many were still hoping for some reprieve. “Grantees were basically cut off at the knees,” as one operative at a smaller foundation put it.
“Since the nonprofit theatre movement solidified in the nineteen-fifties, we have faced government shifting, but not this kind of foundation retrenchment,” Niegel Smith, the artistic director of the Flea theatre (which continues to be funded by Mellon), told me. “When I entered the field, the sense was that you could work and prove yourself and then your company would win enduring support from the pool of foundations. That’s no longer the case.”
In the U.S., private philanthropic foundations—which are required to disburse five per cent of their net investment assets each year—have not only long provided the scaffolding of the arts system but have also been a bulwark against politicization. During the so-called culture wars of the nineteen-nineties, right-wing politicians such as Jesse Helms led a campaign to insert morality clauses into the funding guidelines for the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.); he hoped to ban “homoeroticism,” for instance. While Helms’s specific language did not survive the ensuing lawsuits, the controversy permanently weakened the N.E.A., and its budget—which has never kept pace with inflation—has been used as a political football ever since. For decades, private foundations stepped into the resulting funding gap.
As devastating as recent philanthropic shifts have been, the funding changes of the past few years reflect, in many cases, an attempt on the foundations’ part to create greater equity. In 2017, a much-read study by the Helicon Collaborative, an arts-and-culture consultancy, showed that fifty-eight per cent of all contributed income was going to only two per cent of arts organizations, indicating a hoarding of resources by a few. Under Ford’s current head, Darren Walker, the foundation has seemingly addressed this imbalance, and, in Walker’s words, focussed its “efforts to address the societal drivers of inequality.” An artistic director told me that a Ford program officer was direct about that pivot, and its ramifications: “They said, ‘We’re looking at our impact across the nation, and New York is no longer a priority.’ ” (Ford points out the Foundation has doubled its performance-arts giving since 2018 in New York City. “Support for the arts has long been important to the Ford Foundation and that has not changed,” a spokesperson for Ford wrote. “Our grantmaking strategies operate under a long term cycle, with a focus on smaller groups and networks that lack access to philanthropic resources. These principles will continue to guide our work moving forward.”)
Such a rationale can be hard to argue with. And it’s not just the private foundations. Con Edison, after being a mainstay donor to the arts in New York, announced in late 2023 that it would be “re-aligning” its mission to combat climate change and advance social justice. These are both admirable goals. But creativity without the prerequisite of social efficacy was once touted by these same funders as being crucial to the common good. Certain benefits of the arts (like better community health outcomes) take decades to manifest, while others (like beauty and collective expression) remain stubbornly unquantifiable.
Tommy Kriegsmann, the co-producer of the Under the Radar festival, sees two reasons for the funding rug pull. “From a generational standpoint, we’re seeing a change in arts leadership,” he said. There has been tremendous turnover after decades of stasis, with new artistic directors at theatres including Second Stage, Performance Space New York, Lincoln Center, and Signature. But Kriegsmann may also be referring to the fact that key program staff at Mellon and both Duke’s president and C.E.O., Sam Gill, and Duke’s arts program director, Ashley Ferro-Murray, are relatively new. Kriegsmann acknowledged that “programs like the National Theatre Project, the National Dance Project, that have been around for fifteen or twenty years or more, are coming to a natural end.” Kriegsmann is not sanguine about the destruction, but he also sees the need for innovation. “So—while it’s vile and frightening, it does feel extremely necessary for us to be reënvisioning these programs and structures.” (Under the Radar got a million-dollar grant from Mellon this year, to help with succession planning.)
Mellon’s performing-arts spending nationally has actually risen from thirty-eight to seventy-two million dollars in the past seven years, and it is not abandoning New York. Rather, the foundation seems to be making changes to its giving in two ways: first, a stronger interest in allocating big sums to a comparably small group of individuals—what program officer Stephanie Ybarra has described publicly as “giving an inch wide, but a mile deep”—and second, a shift in its grantee pool toward organizations that haven’t been awarded before. For instance, Randi Berry, the executive director of the microgranting service provider IndieSpace, noted in an e-mail to me that “Mellon hadn’t funded us for the first decade + of our existence but IS in fact funding us now and is our biggest funder.” Still, by cutting loose such on-the-ground intermediaries as MAP, their award-giving will no longer be as decentralized, and some grants will rely on personal invitations. (The national network of regranters and their readers were many; the entire arts and culture staff at Mellon is only sixteen people.) “In recent years we have worked to serve the field even more fully and broadly,” Mellon’s arts and culture program director Deana Haggag, who took the role in January, said. “This has meant, since 2019, nearly doubling the number of grantees and the grantmaking dollars in the performing arts sector, focusing on those who had never received foundation support.”
Duke’s pivot, on the other hand, reflects a wholesale shift in the foundation’s chosen mission in the arts. Maurine Knighton, the chief program officer at Duke, told me that the public response to the funding changes seems inaccurate to her. “The main thing that sticks out to me is the notion that we are reducing or somehow eliminating our arts funding, which is just completely untrue,” she told me. She said that the quantity of available money has stayed the same—around fifty million dollars in giving per year—but the targets have changed. While Duke continues to award six individual artists’ grants (five hundred and fifty thousand dollars each), other monies that once underwrote a host of service and development initiatives will now focus on two major areas: advocacy for artists-as-workers (they plan to announce some programs, but could not yet share details) and new technologies, “not only for distributing creative work but also for producing it,” she said. “We see this as an essential way to future-proof contemporary dance,” Knighton said. She emphasized that Duke had always insisted on the impermanence of any support. “The notion that if you fund something for, you know, a period of time, you are then obligated to fund it forever, really isn’t a reasonable idea,” she said.
There seems to be a widespread distaste among philanthropies for grantees developing dependence on their support. “Indefinite funding is never philanthropy’s promise and should not be the expectation,” a spokesman for Mellon said. Foundations, contra the term, are not necessarily prioritizing stability, even now. The Playwrights Horizons artistic director Adam Greenfield told me that crucial “general operating” support funds have gotten harder to find as funders begin to favor project-specific grants. He thinks that the rise of invitation-only grant applications can “inadvertently privilege personal relationships.” He added, “If the arts are, as I believe, a tool of democracy and a powerful safeguard against oppression, then in this moment—considering the intersecting strains we’re facing (inflation, corporatization, federal cuts)—the stakes of arts funding couldn’t be higher.”
Private foundations are largely beholden only to themselves, and so, at any time, they could turn all these taps back on. But will they? It doesn’t seem likely. The Trump Administration has added yet more volatility to the situation. Earlier this year, in response to executive orders 14173 and 14168, the N.E.A. issued new compliance language, asserting that “the applicant will not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ ” and that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology”—an echo of Helms’s not-so-long-ago efforts. Court injunctions and legal actions have momentarily left those directives up in the air, but federal funds now seem particularly precarious. Executive order 14173, in particular, takes aim at “foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more,” threatening “civil compliance investigations” of the same type that have been levelled against institutions of higher education.
Attacks on granting foundations have already begun. Creative Capital, a twenty-five-year-old granting organization that describes itself as “the gold standard in artist support,” is now facing a public complaint from the activist lawyer Edward Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights asking the I.R.S. to “examine racial practices” at the organization.
The chance to create stability may have passed. Nonprofit foundations, especially those that prioritize climate and diversity, have been bracing themselves against rumors of a further slate of executive orders that might target their tax-exempt status. The Council on Foundations, a membership organization for philanthropies, published a statement of public solidarity, which as of this writing has some five hundred signatories, announcing a field-wide resistance against any attempt to limit their “freedom to direct our resources to a wide variety of important services, issues, and places.” The Times reported that, on April 22nd, a White House official said, “There are no such orders that are being drafted or considered at this time.” That may be true today. But we are clearly on rapidly shifting ground. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a terrible thing, and it can prevent even the well-intentioned from doing good. ♦
