Following President Trump's proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA, hundreds of arts groups across the U.S. received notification of the withdrawal and termination of their grants, as NPR reported. Some of those arts groups facing funding cuts are in Staunton. WMRA’s Meredith McCool reports.
Full disclosure: American Shakespeare Center occasionally underwrites programming on WMRA.
If you’re a young family enjoying a free noontime concert of classical music at Central United Methodist Church, or a local library cardholder who checked out two tickets to see Sense & Sensibility at the Blackfriars Playhouse, you are the beneficiary of NEA funding. Vanessa Morosco is the executive director of the American Shakespeare Center. Their Playhouse is a recreation of Shakespeare's original Blackfriars Theatre.
VANESSA MOROSCO: Funding is hugely essential. One of the things it does is it ensures that, unlike commercial theater, we can keep our prices reasonable or offer different access. So for example, NEA funding helps us offer local access so that we have 50% discounts on our tickets for locals on Wednesday and Thursday night. It also has helped us introduce the library culture pass. … If you have a library card in the region, you can check out two tickets to a play the way you would check out a book.
The American Shakespeare Center has not lost their current NEA grant, although Morosco is keeping an eye on future changes.
MOROSCO: As a Shakespeare Company, we often apply and have received many times what's called the Shakespeare in American Communities grant, and we're on a slightly different timeline than, say, the Challenge America grant, which is funding a lot of summer festivals.
The NEA’s website states that the Challenge America grant opportunity is canceled for fiscal year 2026. The Staunton Music Festival has been a recipient of the Challenge America grant multiple times in the last several years. Jason Stell, executive director of the Staunton Music Festival, told WMRA in an email that “the purpose of the grant application is to help bring world-class music and musicians to live performance for people who might otherwise have challenges experiencing such performances.”
They’ve taken concerts to very rural areas in western Virginia, to inner city Richmond, to senior centers for residents with limited mobility, and to the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind. Primarily, Staunton Music Festival has used the Challenge America grant funding to sponsor a series of free noontime concerts.
Both Morosco and Stell mentioned that their organizations also receive funding from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives its funding from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts. The commission has not announced any federal funding cuts thus far, but would face them if the NEA is eliminated entirely.
MOROSCO: Virginia Commission for the Arts is also a supporter of ours, and they're hugely important to all the arts that occurs in our state, and part of their funding also comes from the federal government. So what we're looking at is potentially a double hit, and we're not alone, right? … I think it's leaving us very vulnerable. It means that we'll have to make some really, really difficult choices. Do we pull programming? Do we remove certain things that funding was meant to support? Are we looking at job loss? … I don't even mean in our organizations. I mean the arts have a huge economic impact in Staunton, and in the area.
For the Staunton Music Festival, those changes could look like one of two scenarios: eliminate a few free concerts from the schedule, or begin to charge admission to those events. According to Stell, neither is acceptable in light of their goals for those free concerts. To charge admission will almost certainly mean that the primary intended audience - low income, fixed income, senior center residents, young parents - will stop attending.
Morosco said that she's not opposed to change, but the sudden nature of these funding cuts leaves arts organizations without adequate time to adjust.
MOROSCO: It is a shift that is very sudden and it's not necessarily prepared, not just organizations, but communities, to take a different set of actions in order to support the economic and artistic ecosystems that they've created.
However, she said artists are uniquely skilled at creative problem solving.
MOROSCO: I work with such a talented team that we come up with 100 ideas every day. I actually think creatives are amazing at that, and actually, humans are amazing at that. I have tremendous faith in the human imagination. It's probably why I do what I do. At the Blackfriars Playhouse, we leverage the human imagination as the single best production value, because the imagination is extraordinary. … I think the way forward is to collaborate, is to invest in each other. I don't think we'll get through this alone.
WMRA reached out to the NEA for comment and did not hear back.
