A nerve-racking year punctuated by tectonic shifts in key sources of support has prompted grant makers and recipients to ask big questions about the dance funding model. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, and Ford Foundation—decades-long supporters of the performing arts—rained down a trio of blows in recent months, with each announcing that […]

If you are a performing artist, I’ll bet that, like me, you feel beaten up, beaten down, slammed against many walls. You are likely searching for hope, but feeling that any kind of sustainable life in the arts is a faraway fantasy, only possible during better times. And weren’t these supposed to be the “better […]

It was 5:45 pm on Friday, May 2, when Megan Kiskaddon, executive director of Seattle’s On the Boards, learned that the grant for that night’s performance had been rescinded. The show, Miguel Gutierrez’s Super Nothing, had opened just the night before—the same day Dance Magazine debuted Gutierrez’s cover. But the National Endowment for the Arts […]

More than 100 National Endowment for the Arts grants to dance organizations remain in limbo this week after President Trump’s administration said it would conduct a review of previously allocated federal aid. Last Wednesday, the administration rescinded a controversial memo that froze all grant funding, and judges have already ruled in favor of states that […]

The International Association of Blacks in Dance is being honored with the United States government’s highest arts award.

As director of dance at the National Endowment for the Arts, Sara Nash needs to be plugged into as many parts of the dance world as possible. Through running the dance grantmaking program, she’s constantly connecting with artists all over the U.S. and discovering the work they need support for. She started her career at […]

The United States has never had a strong tradition of government support for the arts. But we take what we can get and, since its founding in 1965, American artists have gratefully accepted whatever the National Endowment for the Arts is willing and able to give. Though the NEA has at times been aggressively politicized, […]

The fate of the National Endowment for the Arts has had us on tenterhooks (and off…and on again) since the election of Donald Trump. (Actually, we’ve been on and off tenterhooks about it more or less since it was founded.) But yesterday, despite the administration’s repeated proposals to terminate the agency, Congress put forward a […]