Day: May 16, 2025

Last fall, nonprofit theater group What Will the Neighbors Say? got good news: the National Endowment for the Arts had awarded them a $15,000 grant to support the premier of a new play, “At the Barricades,” in Brooklyn.

The group was “overjoyed and really excited,” said co-artistic director Sam Hood Adrain. The grant was “the final piece of the puzzle” to take the production to the next level. What Will the Neighbors Say? would be able to hire more artists, extend the show’s run, and pay everyone involved a little bit more. 

“At the Barricades,” a play about international troops who volunteered to fight against General Francisco Franco and the Nationalist faction in the Spanish Civil War, would run for three weeks at MITU580 in Gowanus starting on June 12. 

But the grant money didn’t come through in January or February, like it usually would. 

“With every week, every month that went by … and the funds weren’t available, we began to become increasingly concerned that they would never come,” Hood Adrain said. “And of course, that’s exactly what happened.” 

On May 2, they got an email from the NEA. The agency was rescinding their grant and wouldn’t be awarding them the $15,000 they had been promised months earlier.  

At the same time, hundreds of arts organizations around the country received nearly identical emails. The exact number of groups affected isn’t clear, but a community-made spreadsheet shows that at least a dozen Brooklyn-based orgs had their funding yanked — including the Brooklyn Children’s Theater, the National Queer Theater, and En Garde Arts.

Shifting ‘policy priorities’ result in funding cuts

Each email said the NEA “will no longer offer award funding” because the agency was “updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” 

Going forward, the emails read, President Donald Trump and the NEA will prioritize projects that “elevate [Historically Black Colleges and Universities], celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.” 

Amy Graves, founder and executive director of the Brooklyn Children’s Theater, said the org focuses on equitable, welcoming musical theater education, and 80% of its students are on scholarships.

“And DEI is a main focus of ours, so we had a heads up that things might not go our way with this administration,” she said. 

Still, she was hopeful that their $10,000 “Challenge America” grant wouldn’t be canceled. The theater had gotten a heads-up about the focus on the 250th anniversary of American independence, and figured they could comply with that directive.

“We’re ready, we write original musicals with kids,” she said. “We can have kids write what they think about that, we’re ready.”

But, on May 2, she got the email. The theater’s mission to “support free musical theater classes for children,” it said,  “[did] not align” with the administration’s priorities.

“I was like, ‘That’s really low,’” Graves said. “To promise an organization money — we got the email in December that we were going to be given this money, we put it in our budget, and now that’s like an extra $10,000 we have to raise before June 30.” 

The language used in the email about the administration’s new priorities was “so confusing,” she said, since the Brooklyn Children’s Theater supports Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities.

“We definitely have all of those populations in our community,” she said. “But there isn’t arts mentioned anywhere, there isn’t low-income communities mentioned anywhere, there’s not children mentioned anywhere.” 

The same day, the NEA pulled a $20,000 grant from the Fort Greene-based National Queer Theater. The funding had been allocated to support the Criminal Queerness Festival, which showcases pieces by queer playwrights from countries where queer identities are “criminalized or silenced.”

It would have been the National Queer Theater’s third NEA grant, said founder Adam Odsess-Rubin. For years, the org relied exclusively on state and city funding.

“We were waiting to be eligible for the National Endowment for the Arts, which is incredibly prestigious, especially for small companies like ours,” he said. “And we were really thrilled to get that funding for our Criminal Queerness Festival, and really thrilled that there was a show of government support for LGBTQ art.”

But the grant, like all the others, was awarded in late 2024, under the Biden administration. The status quo started changing quickly after Trump’s inauguration. 

In March, the National Queer Theater joined an ACLU lawsuit against the NEA after it updated its grant application to comply with Trump’s Executive Order Executive Order 14168, which barred federal agencies from funding “gender ideology.” 

The application forced applicants to certify they wouldn’t use federal funding to “promote gender ideology,” and indicated that any projects the government felt would promote “gender ideology” would not be eligible for funding. 

A day after the suit was filed, the NEA removed the certification requirement – but not the eligibility criteria, meaning projects like the Criminal Queerness Festival are still unlikely to be awarded a grant. 

“It’s not every day you sue the government, and especially this government that feels so vindictive in so many ways against any individuals or organizations that go against their policies,” Odsess-Rubin said. “But this gender ideology ban absolutely infringes on our First Amendment rights and our freedom of expression as artists and targets vulnerable communities, especially the trans community and trans artists.” 

Though the funding cuts were unrelated to the lawsuit, Odsess-Rubin said he felt they are part of a larger shift within the federal government.

“My take on these cuts are they’re part of a larger story of Elon Musk and DOGE gutting the federal government wholesale,” he said. “And it’s not really clear yet for any of us if the cuts were made randomly, or was it because of ideological content.” 

The NEA did not return requests for comment. 

Arts orgs reckon with a shifting financial landscape

While most of the impacted organizations appealed the NEA’s decision, hoping to get their funding back  — “We have to. We don’t want to make it easy on them,” Graves said — they were not optimistic about the outcome. Now, they’re scrambling to find alternative sources of cash.

The Brooklyn Children’s Theatre is trying to raise an additional $10,000 before the end of the fiscal year in June. The org doesn’t have extra money in the budget to cut, Graves said. 

“We might have to pinch pennies and cut some programs going into next year if we can’t make it back,” she said. “Our budget is like $850,000. We have two full-time employees, and part-time employees. The two of us that are full-time are already doing everything.”

The federal grant would have made up about 20% of the budget for the Criminal Queerness Festival, Odsess-Rubin said. With less than a month to go before the festival starts, the National Queer Theater launched a GoFundMe to make up the difference. As of May 14, the fundraiser had garnered more than $9,000 in donations. 

Some of the affected organizations had contingency plans.

Hood Adrain and Clements, for example, saw the writing on the wall, and were able to secure a community loan from theater nonprofit IndieSpace. Thanks to that loan — and the continued support of its other funders, like the Brooklyn Arts Council and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, “At the Barricades” will be performed as scheduled. 

“We knew artists were going to be targeted,” by the Trump administration, said Randi Berry, executive director of IndieSpace.

The nonprofit has been providing 0% interest loans to arts and theater groups for years, she said, most often to bridge the gap while those groups are waiting for grant funding or fundraisers.

Granting the loan to What Will the Neighbors Say? was a “calculated risk,” she said, since they suspected the NEA grant might fall through, leaving them without an easy way to pay back the loan.

Hood Adrain said paying the dozens of artists hired for “At the Barricades” was most important. When the run is over, they’ll figure out their long-term financial future — including repaying IndieSpace.

“It mostly will be really rigorous financial planning for the loan period,” Hood Adrain said. “Whether that means James and I don’t take our small monthly stipend so we can meet our commitments to IndieSpace, or we do more robust individual giving campaigns.”

But the impact won’t end this year, he said. What Will the Neighbors Say? — which has been awarded NEA funding twice in years past, and has applied almost every year — won’t apply for NEA grants for at least the duration of the Trump administration because of the gender ideology stipulations.

“Those are not things that we were willing to sign on to, so we did not put in an NEA ask for next season, because we would refuse to comply with those requirements that they are asking of organizations,” Hood Adrain said. “At least for the next three years, the NEA will not be a budget line item for us.”

The Brooklyn Children’s Theatre likely won’t apply, either, Graves said, joking that it would be “a lot of work for nothing.”

“We could apply, but if the people reading the application are actually standing by what he wants, there’s no way they would choose us,” she said. 

The Challenge America grant the Children’s Theatre was supposed to receive has been canceled for FY2026 “to focus NEA staff resources on the Grants for Arts Projects category,” according to an agency press release.

Grants aren’t the only thing in question at the NEA — the future of the entire agency is uncertain. On May 2, the Trump administration proposed eliminating the agency wholesale in its FY2026 budget request, and many staffers have left.

“We got a notice from the NEA officers we’ve been working with that they had all been offered resignations, so they’ve all resigned,” Graves said. “So our human contacts that we had aren’t there anymore.”

In a statement, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer — the Senate minority leader and a native Brooklynite — said the cuts put “many of New York’s arts, arts education and other cultural organizations in jeopardy.”

“The Trump administration’s proposed budget recklessly eliminates all federal funding for the NEA,” he said. “The proposed budget is yet another gut punch to New Yorkers and the American people, and it is dead on arrival in the Senate.”

In FY2022, Congress allocated $180 million in funding to the NEA — about .003% of the total federal budget for that year. Funding rose slightly, to $207 million, in FY2024. About 80% of NEA funding was allocated to arts organizations around the country via grants and awards. 

Alternative sources of funding 

En Garde Arts, a site-specific theater company headquartered in Fort Greene, lost a $40,000 grant for its Uncommon Voices program, which had been supported by the NEA for years.

“This is a huge blow to the Uncommon Voices program — and while we as an organization will survive, we’re most concerned about the artists this money was meant to support,” said En Garde’s founding artistic director Anne Hamburger. 

In response to the NEA cuts, En Garde launched the Art Is Not Expendable fundraising campaign, promising to use 50% of the donations to commission artists for “new, site-specific works around the intersection of theatre and social change.”

“Being in the game so long, I have seen so many talented, young artists leave the field because they cannot get the funding they need,” Hamburger said. “At big theaters, at small theaters, all across America, the first people to lose support are the bold, unknown, and extraordinary new voices. It has long been our mission to support the work of these artists — and that is why we’re launching this campaign.”

The nonprofit David M. Milch Foundation is matching any donations to the Art Is Not Expendable campaign up to $50,000. Other larger nonprofits have stepped up, too — the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation are jointly offering $80,000 to “small and midsize” orgs that lost NEA funding. 

That kind of support is much-needed, Berry said. 

“I’m curious about how donors and philanthropy will end up showing up for us in this moment,” she said. “Most small budget organizations depend, in some cases solely, on city and state funding, some on federal funding, because their budgets are too small to be eligible for private foundation funding.”

The show must go on

Though the grant cuts were alarming, Brooklynites said they would not be dissuaded from speaking up and creating art.

“What’s weird is as a nonprofit, you aren’t allowed to engage in politics … but now we don’t have a choice. So that’s really interesting,” Graves said. “I’ve been really careful about not mentioning one side or the other, but this is such a clear violation of everything that we stand for that directly impacts us.”

Odsess-Rubin encouraged Brooklynites to remember that the arts “inspire us, they give us hope,” in challenging times, and emphasized the NEA’s educational programs in rural areas.

“There’s an economic argument and I think a moral argument for why we need to preserve arts funding in America,” he said. “Just as we pay taxes that go to fund the fire department and public schools, part of a healthy democracy is also having a thriving arts and culture sector.”  

Hood Adrain said the situation drove home the importance of holding a “historical lens” up to audiences to reflect current events. 

“I think telling these stories, there’s always the axiom of history repeats itself…but in the time we’re living in, history does repeat itself,” he said. “And I think it’s really important to remind folks of what has happened before can unfortunately happen again.”