By Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan
On May 3, 2025, the New York Times reported that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had begun terminating previously awarded grants. The decision followed a sweeping revision of the agency’s funding priorities, as outlined in emails sent to nonprofit arts organizations across the country. These messages stated:
“The N.E.A. 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 new areas of focus include projects that celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, promote AI competency, support historically Black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions, assist with disaster recovery, strengthen skilled trades, empower houses of worship, and serve military and veteran communities, among other areas.
In response, artist and director Annie Dorsen launched a crowdsourced database to track which grants were being withdrawn. That open spreadsheet quickly became a critical resource for understanding the scale of these changes.
At Arts Analytics, we’ve taken the crowdsourced data and integrated it into our platform to make it easier to explore, analyze, and visualize the scope of terminated NEA grants. You can now browse terminations by state, search for individual organizations, and examine which disciplines have been most affected.
Here are a few key takeaways from the current data as of May 20, 2025:
- 526 grants have been documented as cancelled or withdrawn for a total of $26,810,600.00.
- In California, 60 grants have been terminated, and 20% of those were at theater organizations.
Explore the California record - The Atlanta Ballet, for example, lost a $15,000 grant.
View the Atlanta Ballet record - Theater organizations account for the largest share of terminations (~20%), followed by dance (14%) and visual arts (10%).
Explore by discipline - Most cancelled grants are in the $20,000 range, reflecting a typical size of NEA awards.
Explore by grant amount
We also took all of these grants and mapped them across the USA. Check it out! Each state is color-coded like a “heat map” of terminated grant amounts. (Note: the map shows terminated grant totals for each state — disregard the specific county-names.) Some clear patterns are emerging:
- Seven states—Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia—have not reported any cancelled grants to date.
- New York (126 terminations) and California (60) have seen the highest number of cancelled grants, totaling $4.129 million and $1.75 million respectively.
As more information becomes available, we’ll continue to update the dashboard. Annie Dorsen’s original data collection form is still active, and we’re hoping to be in conversation with her team to explore ways to streamline and expand data access.
If your organization has been affected—or you know one that has—please encourage them to submit their information. The more data we have, the more effectively we can track the broader implications of these shifts on the arts sector.