Announcing the 2025 Praxis Project Fund Awardees
September 25, 2025 • 5 minute read
The National Performance Network (NPN) is thrilled to announce its first Praxis Project fund awardees. Praxis Project funds support organizational partnerships between arts and social justice organizations to increase the capacity for local visionary organizing. Visionary organizing, as described by Grace Lee Boggs, is “organizing which gives you the opportunity to encourage the creative capacity in people.”
Praxis Project awarded $110,000 to 11 NPN Partner organizations and local community organizations/collectives. This fund supports experimentation, collaboration, and the deepening of relationships to connect/more deeply embed cultural organizations into the local organizing for change infrastructure. These projects move beyond transactional engagement and toward transformative exchange — fostering collaboration, shared learning, and long-term impact.
2025 Praxis Project Awardees
516 ARTS
516 ARTS and the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRCNM) will collaborate to archive and share the oral histories, messages, and art of trans and gender-diverse communities statewide via participant-led pictures, audio recordings, and art creations. The partnership combines TGRCNM’s trusted community presence and virtual reach with 516 ARTS’ artistic resources and infrastructure to foster mutual learning, healing, and connection through the arts. Together, they aim to elevate awareness, share resources, and build solidarity around one of our community’s most targeted and vulnerable populations, affirming their strength, creativity, and right to thrive.
Asian Arts Initiative
In 2026, Asian Arts Initiative (AAI) will partner with the Abolition School to jointly manage the next iteration of its Artist/Activist Fellowship. AAI Fellowship staff will attend the Abolition School’s next Fall Cohort in 2025, and Abolition School staff will be invited to advise the iterative process offered to artists and/or activists in the Fellowship. This partnership will continue AAI’s focus on building Afro-Asian solidarity, with a renewed focus on self-education informed by the teachings and curricula pioneered by the Abolition School and its core principles of abolition, internationalism, intersectionality, and participatory education.
Dance Place
Dance Place and the Arts Administrators of Color Network (AAC) will partner to convene cultural leaders across the DMV area for a series of intimate, facilitated gatherings rooted in arts, dialogue, and shared meals. These convenings aim to deepen relationships, identify common needs, and spark planning for collective mobilization, and actions in response to the current nonprofit and arts presenting environment.
Double Edge Theatre
Double Edge Theatre (DE) is partnering with Martin Luther King, Jr. Family Services (MLKFS), a Springfield-based organization dedicated to shaping futures and igniting transformation across cultures and generations throughout Western Mass by empowering individuals, youth and families to overcome barriers, rise and lead purposeful, liberated lives. Between September 2025 and August 2026, DE will host multidisciplinary workshops with MLKFS youth and field trips to DE’s Farm Center that will include performance viewing and discussion. This collaboration is a first step toward a sustained relationship that merges cultural strategy with local organizing.
Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center
Nuestras Voces: Cultural Empowerment Through Dance and Education expands the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s longstanding youth education series Viva Mi Cultura by deepening its relationship with the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute (MACRI). Through this partnership, the project will develop bilingual study guides, school-based lecture-demonstrations, and a collaborative framework for long-term cultural education. Grounded at this stage in the upcoming and powerful storytelling of the original Nuestras Voces performance, this initiative addresses historical erasure by bringing Mexican American civil rights narratives into classrooms and community spaces.
Kelly Strayhorn Theater
Did we ever really learn civics? 1Hood Media and Kelly Strayhorn Theater (KST) present four electrifying Civics Cyphers—dynamic gatherings where government systems and civic rights get broken down, tackling fresh issues with each Cypher. Join us at the KST Lounge for real talk with activists and political wiz-kids, plus live performances, a bar, and hands-on activities. No question is too basic; everyone’s invited to engage, learn, and grab practical voter tools. Civics Cyphers are your gateway to everyday political power—with community, creativity, and conversation at the core.
Pangea World Theater
Pangea World Theater and the Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF) have collaborated for over ten years. We have collaborated closely with the Ikidowin Acting Ensemble (a program of IPTF). The foundation of this project rests on our deep collaboration which develops new multi-cultural, Indigenous-rooted principles for working with people and the earth. These new processes can guide every aspect of our organizations and how we create both physical space and space for new/ancient visions to emerge. We will transmit these values to our community through time in Story Circles and also in community gatherings. We will share out to a wider audience what we learned and what we gleaned from the Story Circles.
Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT)
This project will support and further bolster ongoing community relationships between REDCAT, CalArts, and the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians (FTBMI) in a commitment to amplifying Indigenous voices, decolonization, and rematriation. Stewarded with the help of Chad Hamill/čnaq’ymi, Executive Director, Indigenous Arts and Expression and Senior Advisor to the President on Indigenous Affairs at CalArts, REDCAT will work with Dennis Garcia, Chair of the Elder’s Council and the Education and Cultural Learning Department of the FTBMI to host a series of conversations rooted in relationship-building with the First Peoples of present day Los Angeles County.
Redline Contemporary Arts Center
In collaboration with the Colorado Palestinian Coalition (CPC), RedLine will host the exhibition, Unseen, featuring the daily lives of Denver-based Palestinians and their families documented by ten local photographers. To help contextualize and connect local Palestinians within the global Palestinian narrative, RedLine will include photographs presented by Middle East Images. This capacity building project promotes cross-cultural dialogue among Palestinian and Southwest Asian diasporic communities positioned as an incubator to foster more empathetic and informed discourse through curated panel discussions, film screenings, and visual art exhibitions.
Su Teatro Cultural Center
Su Teatro and the GES Community Investment Fund will collaborate with artists, residents and activists to articulate and disrupt the evolving history of racial discrimination and environmental injustice in Denver’s Globeville, Elyria and Swansea (GES) neighborhoods, zip code 80216, the most polluted zip code in the country.
TeAda Productions
Through a 9-session, month long community engagement workshop series, TeAda Productions in partnership with The Program for Torture Victims will collaborate in the TeAda Methodology using devised ensemble creation, theater-based activities, and story circles to mitigate the impacts of trauma, instill creative courage, and cultivate community among artists and asylum seekers. The series will culminate in a public performance work highlighting stories, themes, and pieces created in the workshops.
