Every theatre company starts somewhere. Every small, grassroots arts organization and massive, multimillion-dollar producing institution has an origin story. It begins when the founders imagine the theatre they want to create—its mission, composition, audience, and funding—and figure out how to grow that from the ground up. It’s much easier said than done.
But it keeps getting done, and maybe you’ve thought about doing it too. I spoke with founders and leaders of 10 recently established theatre companies across the country to pull the curtain back on the many considerations and challenges that go into starting and running a theatre company in 2026.
Why (and With Who)?
A lot of theatre companies get their start by identifying something that’s missing in their local scene, building their mission around filling that gap, and gathering like-minded folks around that vision. Consider LakehouseRanchDotPNG, founded in 2022, which bills itself as “an absurdist and experimental theatre company for South Florida.” Its seed was planted a few years earlier, when co-founder Brandon Urrutia noticed that “everyone down here is doing, for better or for worse, kitchen-sink dramas, and they’re not that fun, and they’re not that interesting. We want to do cool stuff.” Most recent: LakehouseRanchDotPNG’s production of Erin Proctor’s supernatural rom-com [overlap], which can be viewed online on Proctor’s YouTube channel.
Similarly, Alabama’s Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective (BBRTC) was founded in 2019 to create more opportunities for Black artists based in or hailing from the city. “There’s so much talent in Birmingham that either isn’t given a shot or is given the same shot over and over again—and that shot is typically not the ingénue,” said BBRTC’s co-artistic director, Jada Cato. The company, she added, is “a place where Black art and playwrights are celebrated, where Black actors in Birmingham have access to what we call creative capital: all of the resources, time, money, energy, people that are needed to make art.” BBRTC continues to expand access to that creative capital through community-engaged performance art, educational development offerings, and advocacy throughout Birmingham and the Southeast U.S.
In another case of creating a home for something they found lacking, Molly Fonseca and Anikka Lekven met as performers on a show together in Austin in 2019. They had been cast as “the secretary” and “the wife,” alongside “roughly 12 men who had much more interesting roles.” The gender disparity became especially apparent one night during the run, according to Fonseca.
“I needed a tampon and there weren’t a lot of women in this show,” Fonseca recalled. “I ended up asking Anikka if I could borrow a tampon from her, and that was one of the first times we spoke. We just talked backstage about how we felt about theatre in Austin and how we were really unhappy with the roles for us to act in.”
A few months later, they produce Fonseca’s play MS together as Broad Theatre, a company established to “challenge the theatrical landscape in Austin and produce more shows by and for people with marginalized genders.” Sometimes a backstage favor can spark a discussion, a friendship, and a theatre company all at once.
If you’re in school or training, finding like-minded peers to start a company with isn’t usually too difficult. NYC’s Fruit Fly Theatre Co., for instance, was founded in 2025 by three recent Stella Adler Studio of Acting graduates as a way to continue to practice their craft and create professional opportunities for themselves.
“We just wanted to do something active instead of just waiting around to be cast in things as actors,” said artistic director and executive producer Naomi Orange. That isn’t to say their mission is entirely self-serving; Orange also noted that “we wanted to make work that uplifted more queer people who don’t come from a ton of money, and we wanted to produce work with other immigrants.” They had just presented a reading of La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca with an all-woman Latine cast the night before speaking to me, so their goals were surely top of mind.
What Works?
If you’ve managed to land on a mission for a theatre company alongside collaborators you trust, the question of programming is the next logical question to tackle together. Theatre companies at all levels dedicate time to and energy to season planning, a practice that involves aligning artistic ambitions with the spaces and resources available in a given timeframe.
This can be a long, deliberative, arduous process. If you’re just starting out, you may also find value in just producing, experimenting, and iterating before landing on a programming ethos. It worked for Los Angeles’s Foster Cat Productions, at least.
As Harry White, Foster Cat’s co-artistic director explained to me, Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021 prompted the team to stage a production of the lesser-known anthology show Putting It Together as a memorial tribute. That production was followed by No One Will Be Immune, a lesser-known David Mamet play, and an evening of one-act plays by Ethan Coen, better known for his filmmaking.
After positive feedback from audiences, “lesser-known works by great writers” became Foster Cat Productions’ official programming ethos when it was founded in 2022. (The team has also fostered more than 30 cats and used their productions to fundraise for local animal shelters; hence the name.)
You may also want to consider how engagements other than full theatrical productions or readings may fit into your larger programming menu. For NYC’s Good Apples Collective, programming is more than just the work they present onstage themselves. On top of a new-play reading series and a bone-chilling production of Road Kills, written by co-founder Sophie McIntosh and directed by co-founder Nina Goodheart, the company’s 2025 season announcement included playwright-director speed dating, artistic coworking events, and a host of free online resources—including sample producing budgets and a playwright contract explainer—for the city’s indie theatre scene. According to Goodheart, finding ways to support other independent theatremakers and demystify the work of self-producing was a core consideration when starting the company with McIntosh back in 2022. “What makes this not just the Nina and Sophie show?” she said they wondered. “How could we serve other peer artists in a meaningful way? And specifically, how could we do that without having money to produce their projects?”
Whether presented onstage for an audience or not, your programming should be a reflection of your company’s values, and something that you and your collaborators have the capacity and resources to steward to completion.
Who’s Coming?
How do you make sure your work reaches beyond just your company members’ friends and family? You’ll want to take time to understand the needs and desires of your target audience, and figure out which communication channels are best for putting information in front of them.
Community reciprocity is especially crucial at Perceptions Theatre, the Chicago-based self-proclaimed “full-service theatre company” founded in 2019 to make theatre and theatremaking more accessible to Black communities in Chicago’s South Side. On top of programming local playwrights, the company provides “training for beginner and intermediate artists on the stage and behind the curtain to develop their careers.” That local service model is essential, according to artistic director Myesha-Tiara: “We don’t want to go into the community, make art, and say ‘give us money,’ but then not also include the community in what we’re doing. I just feel like that’s just not authentic and it’s not helpful.”
Myesha-Tiara also noted that marketing and PR overall was one area for which the company hired an external handler, Jessica Gillespie, with no regrets: “She’s freaking amazing. She’s gotten us on so many different news magazines, news articles, radio shows to be able to talk about our art in different areas, and we also make sure we’re on Instagram and TikTok. We try to hit all the bases.” Indeed, if marketing and PR aren’t strong suits for any of your founders or leaders, it may be wise to look into external options.
Are you hoping to reach communities and audiences who haven’t historically felt welcome in theatre spaces? You’ll want to strategize around access and space-making, and find ways to communicate that an experience with your company will look and feel differently than it does elsewhere.
For Jenny S. Lee, associate producer at CHUANG Stage, Boston’s Asian American professional nonprofit theatre company, founded in 2018, breaking down multiple barriers is required to “intentionally create a bridge between the Asian community and this art form that isn’t often a place that has doors wide open to Asian people.”
Cost is one barrier CHUANG Stage addresses with a “Pay-As-You-Are with $0 Minimum” tiered pricing model for all of their events. According to Lee, “Part of that access is absolutely our multilingual focus in terms of art. Very rarely do we ever get to see our own languages onstage.” Executive director Alison Yueming Qu cited projected surtitles as the norm for the company, while Jeanine Jacinto, the company’s marketing and communications associate, talked about cultural visibility among the “Facebook aunties.” A big part of Chuang Stage’s strategy is “having all of our artists’ faces seen. Our biggest posts are the ones when we announce the cast.”
Again, this is an area where you may find value in observing and iterating. Pay attention to what gets attention, and listen to feedback about what excites your patrons. If you can replicate those things, you’re off to a great start building an audience.
Who Decides?
If you’re just starting a theatre company, you may have given yourself and your collaborators titles, but chances are you don’t have an official job description beyond “doing what needs to be done” or “wearing a lot of hats.” While there is no one-size-fits-all leadership model, many of the folks I spoke to agreed that discussing strengths, weaknesses, responsibilities, and decision-making among their collaborators was a helpful exercise—and one many wished they had done sooner.
While shared leadership models were common among the companies I spoke with, most still had at least one person holding the title of artistic or executive director. That’s why I was particularly intrigued by the Story Theatre in Chicago, first established in 2018. In May 2020, the company “dissolved the traditional hierarchical role of an artistic director in favor of an artistic governing ensemble where every voice, and vote, is equal.”
Said Paul Michael Thomson, one of five current artistic governing ensemble members, “There were a lot of theatre companies that made representational changes like who was in positions of power during 2020 and 2021, but not many made structural changes to say that actually we’re going to reorganize how the company is even governed. Shared leadership was always a value of ours, but then we were able to institutionalize that in a really structural way through the invention of the governing ensemble.”
In crafting their flat, non-hierarchical leadership model, the team took inspiration from the kinds of rehearsal rooms they like to run, even on the day of my conversation with them. That morning, Ayanna Bria Bakari, another member of the artistic governing ensemble, was directing a blocking rehearsal for the Story’s production of Thomson’s play Pot Girls, and had asked, “Okay, where should we go from?” Even within her own practice of ceding and sharing power in the room as a director, Bakari was surprised and delighted when an understudy who was not actively working in the scene suggested that they “go back from Edward’s entrance.”
Sharing has its own challenges. One is pay equity: Thomson imagined the math if they increased their salary “to even $20,000, which is not livable and is much more than we currently make to do our work—we would have to do 20,000 times four or times five.” Productivity can be another hurdle, conceded artistic governing ensemble member Brenna DiStasio. “Sometimes people will ask, ‘That’s such a cool model. How do you get anything done—if you’re trying to get eight people to make a decision together, doesn’t that take so long?’ And the answer is yes.”
Even if the complete dissolution of traditional leadership models isn’t your speed, it’s wise to have systems in place to ensure all relevant voices are heard and considered when making decisions for the company. Within the Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective, most major decisions are made within the trio of the company’s two co-artistic directors, Jada Cato and David H. Parker, and their director of operations, Kayla Hampton. But instead of a “majority rules” system that is common within three-person teams, they explained to me that they work within a “range of tolerance” system for decision-making, wherein someone being at a “5” on a decision indicates their full consent, while being a “1” would mean that decision breaks a consent boundary for them. Not even two “5s” can overrule any leader’s “1,” and all the numbers in between indicate areas where more discussion or questions would be appropriate.
Interestingly, in discussing leadership structures, a sage African proverb came up in conversations with both the Story Theatre and the BBRTC: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” I’d say that’s pretty good advice.
Where Can You Go?
Where will you rehearse and perform your work? In my past production experience, this is one of the most existential and stress-inducing questions of any theatrical process. In speaking to folks for this piece, this question seemed to prompt the most clear regional differences in the answers.
If you’re working within or around Chicago’s strong storefront theatre scene, you may want to seek out donated space agreements and resident company arrangements that support emerging theatre companies. Chicago’s ETA Creative Arts Foundation donated space to Perceptions Theatre for their recent production of Kelundra Smith’s The Wash, which allowed the team to pay artists at higher rates for that production. The Story Theatre is the resident company of Chicago’s Raven Theatre, which has had a complete turnover in leadership since the resident company arrangement began, and their partnership is still going strong. Boston’s CHUANG Stage also benefits from being a resident theatre company of the Boston Center for the Arts.
In NYC, where artist spaces are comparatively abundant but vary widely and usually come at a premium, you may have to keep tabs on a large list of potential space options and rent them on a per-production basis. Said Fruit Fly Theatre Co. co-founder Valentina Avila: “There are a lot of middle ground rehearsal spaces in the city of different levels…It’s just a matter of reaching out, trying to be organized with the times, because obviously you need to book those spaces ahead of time. If you leave it for the last minute, you do have less options.”
This is another place where the Good Apples Collective’s free online resources come into play: The NYC-based company has a rehearsal space database and performance space database available for free on their website, complete with information on pricing square footage and other space quirks, with each database updated regularly.
If you’re working elsewhere, scrappy DIY solutions for space needs may be your best bet. Leaders at Foster Cat Productions in L.A. mentioned the classic living room rehearsal setup, and Brandon Urrutia from LakehouseRanchDotPNG mentioned holding rehearsals in the lobby of their alma mater’s alumni building, with or without a prior reservation.
In Portland, Oregon, an acting-studio-turned-performance-space was a major catalyst for the creation of the recently established 100 Lives Repertory, which produces work “centered on the craft of acting and the work of women artists over 40.” Co-founder Brooke Totman began teaching acting classes in 2017, and was gradually renovating her 750-square-foot studio into more of a black box theatre space. Then, last year, Annie Kehoe and Blaine Palmer, students in Totman’s advanced acting class, approached her with a proposal to produce plays in the studio. As Totman tells it, “We talked about the kind of theatre that inspires us, the kind of art we’d want to create. The more we talked about it, the more we realized we were all on the same page. By the end of the meeting, we were like, well, let’s just become a nonprofit and do this as a theatre company.”
At the end of the day, your programming has to happen somewhere. Based on what I heard and my own experience, finding space to rehearse and perform will likely require a lot of work and at least a little bit of luck, particularly if you’re committed to in-person, co-presented programming. Don’t count out the magic of a living room, though; high-profile theatre from established companies is happening in them even now.
Who Pays?
If you’re just starting out with a new theatre company, I can offer one piece of advice very confidently: Look into the benefits of 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The majority of the companies I spoke to either have or aspire to 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, and for good reason. That nonprofit status is what allows theatre companies to receive tax-deductible donations, and be exempt from sales tax on purchases. As Perceptions Theatre artistic director Myesha-Tiara put it, “Being tax-exempt is really beneficial when you don’t have that much money to begin with.” Multiple folks I spoke to also mentioned that some of the grants they apply to can only be awarded to nonprofit organizations.
The downsides: The paperwork and administrative labor related to state and federal filing and recordkeeping can be challenging, especially for small teams. “IRS forms are a hassle,” LakehouseRanchDotPNG’s Urrutia noted before listing off a variety of different paperwork and filing deadlines they had to keep up with and complete themselves to maintain compliance.
If you’re looking for an alternative, you may consider a fiscal sponsorship model, wherein a company is sponsored by a mission-aligned organization that has nonprofit status and can thus take advantage of some benefits of that nonprofit status. Good Apples Collective, for example, is an LLC that is fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Fractured Atlas.
Another piece of financial advice for those who are starting a theatre company right now: Prepare for turbulence, whether you’re seeking funding from grants, foundations, or individual donors. Folks across the board highlighted how challenging and volatile the theatre funding landscape has been in recent years. Federal funding cuts and shifts have received lots of attention under the current administration, but state, local, foundation, and individual giving are all tighter lately as well. These shifts can have major impacts on smaller, newer theatre companies.
For example: Austin’s Broad Theatre was awarded a $40,000 grant from the city in 2024, the first year they were incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. That grant provided the majority of the company’s operating budget for their 2024-25 season, which included a spellbinding production of Maxine Dillon’s Unbury Your Gays, a sapphic teenage love story spanning both centuries and the gap between life and the afterlife. At the time, that grant was focused on arts nonprofits geared toward serving underrepresented communities in Austin, including LGBTQ communities. But in 2025, both the grant timeline and eligibility requirements changed, eliminating that focus on underserved communities. After multiple application timeline delays, it is unclear at the time of this writing whether Broad Theatre will be awarded any city funding at all. “Because there now is a limit to the amount of city funding we can get,” co-founder Anikka Lekven lamented, “it feels like our opportunities for growth are very limited for us as a brand-new theatre company.”
If your only goal is to make money, starting a theatre company isn’t the best choice. The majority of the folks I spoke to were not earning a full-time salary for the work they were doing leading their recently founded theatre companies, and in some cases were funding the operations of their companies out of their own pockets.
What to Do?
To close out each interview, I asked the founders and leaders of the 10 companies I spoke to if they had any advice for folks hoping to start their own theatre company in 2026.
Molly Fonseca, co-founder, Broad Theatre:
“Take things slowly and allow yourself to grow.”
Annie Kehoe, co-founder, 100 Lives Repertory:
“Find the right people—people who are kind and committed and who are gonna work as hard as you are.”
Sophie McIntosh, co-founder, Good Apples Collective:
“Send the bold email. Fire it off.”
Valentine Marie, co-founder and producer, Fruit Fly Theatre Co.:
“You need to be in business with people who you fully trust and who have your back.”
Paul Michael Thomson, artistic governing ensemble member, the Story Theatre:
“Permanence and perfection are not the goal. Your presence is the goal.”
Jada Cato, co-artistic director, Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective:
“Don’t feel the pressure to know everything all the time.”
Jerluane “Jae” Jenkins, executive director, Perceptions Theatre:
“Everything that I feel like we needed to learn, we learned along the way at the exact moment we were supposed to learn it.”
Alison Yueming Qu, executive director, CHUANG Stage:
“I have three words: Go for it.”
Adam Wassilchalk (he/him) is a Harlem-based arts writer, stage manager, and production manager from Austin, Texas.
