South Coast Repertory was celebrating the opening night of a play it had commissioned and spent years developing when it received the notification: The $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant that funded the project had been canceled.
The Tony Award-winning theater in Costa Mesa was not alone. By Monday, nonprofits in and around L.A. — including the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, L.A. Theatre Works and the Industry — were scrambling to plug funding gaps as large as $50,000, money that in some cases had already been spent.
“The NEA is 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. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities,” the Friday night emails to arts groups said, adding that their project “does not align with these priorities.”
The grant cancellations marked the latest salvo in Trump’s battle to claim the landscape of American arts and culture, including his takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; his elimination of federal funding for what he called “divisive” exhibits about racism and sexism in America at the Smithsonian; his drastic cuts to the National Endowment for Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services; and his broader efforts to eliminate the NEA altogether.
“It’s really gonna leave us in the red, I think,” said Edgar Miramontes, executive and artistic director of CAP UCLA, which spent its $40,000 grant in January on a program featuring Congolese dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula, who used movement to honor maternal ancestors and to tell the story of women in his clan.
CAP UCLA’s grant had been recommended for fulfillment by the NEA but was not yet finalized. That was not a concern, Miramontes said. Precedent suggested that the money would come through based on the recommendation. But then the cancellation came.
CAP UCLA has long benefited from its connection to UCLA, but universities are also facing the threat of federal funding cuts under the Trump administration. This leaves the organization to turn to individual donors, many of whom are reluctant to give when the stock market is so volatile and the economic outlook is so clouded by Trump tariffs.
The funding shocks add to the challenges arts organizations are still grappling with in their post-COVID-19 recovery.
“This feels like another layer,” Miramontes said, adding that audiences were just beginning to come back and reengage with live performance. “Now having to deal with this potential ongoing loss is really difficult to think about.”
Created by an act of Congress in 1965, the NEA has been a diminishing but still important source of funding for six decades across a range of cultural disciplines targeting all kinds of audiences — young and old, low and high. In the last five years, it has given nearly $82 million to arts organizations in California.
“We would never have imagined that there would be a world where arts education and telling the American story through music would not be a priority for this kind of august granting body that’s funded by our tax dollars,” said LACO Executive Director Ben Cadwallader, who lost a $25,000 grant for a residency with pianist Lara Downes. “How we tell our stories is how we define ourselves. That’s our identity, and without the backing of the federal government in that effort, it’s just profoundly demoralizing.”
LACO’s grant had already been funded and spent. The program in question had been completed after Downes conducted residencies and concerts at the Watts Learning Center school campus as well as with USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative.
“If it weren’t so sad, it would be a little bit comical to receive this termination notice after everything has already been accomplished,” said Cadwallader, who speculated that LACO got the notice because the grant was marked “active” in the NEA portal.
According to an email sent to its grantees by the California Arts Council, which acts at the state’s arts agency and receives funding from the NEA, the grant rescissions appear to be widespread but “not uniformly applied across all grantees.”
Los Angeles Master Chorale, for example, received its full $50,000 grant for its “Lift Every Voice” program and got no letter, said President and Chief Executive Scott Altman.
“As I’m connecting with sister organizations and hearing from colleagues across the country, we seem to be a bit of an anomaly,” Altman said. “I think it’s just head-spinning to try to interpret things that are so erratic. That’s the struggle that organizations are encountering right now — how to possibly read into what is being sought under new guidelines.”
The lack of clarity about how these funding decisions are being made — and whether the NEA will exist in the future — is making it hard for groups to plan programming.
At L.A. Theatre Works, which bills itself as the country’s leading producer of audio theater, Managing Director Vicki Pearlson said the nonprofit has reliably received grants from the NEA for decades. This year’s grant, the first ever to get pulled back, was for $50,000.
“It’s never a guarantee that you’re going to get an award, but with a long history in your budget planning, you project that it will be there,” Pearlson said. “It’s difficult when there are such stalwarts in arts funding, such as the NEA, that now simply are up in the air.”
CAP UCLA and South Coast Repertory plan to appeal the rescission of grant money that has already been spent. The NEA letters state that groups have seven days to appeal.
“Promised matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed our organization to secure the resources necessary to produce this work,” SCR wrote in a statement about “The Staircase” by Noa Gardner. “The vast majority of artists, artisans and technicians working on our production are local to Orange County and Southern California, creating hundreds of jobs for our local workforce.”
The impact of NEA cuts on communities and individual artists could be huge, said Carissa Gutierrez, director of public affairs for the California Arts Council.
“We already know that artists face increased economic instability with fewer grants and project opportunities, so we know that any potential cuts to organizations throughout the state could, in fact, impact artists directly and communities as well,” Gutierrez said, adding that the council is tracking organizations that lost funding along with the size of their budgets to understand how those losses might be offset.
“We are working around the clock,” Gutierrez said.
Artists are doing the same.
“When times are like this, when there is so much chaos, my job feels very important,” said LACO’s creative partner Lara Downes. “When we’re making music, and we’re creating that space for people to be together to focus on beauty and truth. It just feels extremely urgent and extremely big.”
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