A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series
[In the New York Times last summer, incumbent artistic director of the Public Theater in New York Oskar Eustis announced his retirement from the company effective in two years (“Nurturer of Theater Intends to Move On,” 23 July 2026 [Section C: “Arts”]). He also declared, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over.”
[“That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over,” Eustis added. “But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model.” In several past posts on Rick On Theater, readers have heard that the American theater, especially the regional and resident companies, is in crisis (see, for instance, “A Crisis In America's Theaters” [13 September 2023]).
[(There’s a list [with links] of blog articles about regional theater in the U.S. at the top of "Defying the Odds Far From Broadway" by Michael Paulson [22 December 2025].)
[The current issue of the Theatre Communications Group magazine American Theatre is publishing a series of short articles that attests to the belief, according to Kelundra Smith, publisher of AT, “that the American theatre hasn’t reached its climax.”
[“But it is in need of reimagining,” Smith admonishes. And her colleague LaTeshia Ellerson, TCG’s Co-Executive Director for National Engagement, chimes in with “there is so much we can learn from each other.”
[I’m reposting the articles in “A Tale of Three Cities” because . . . well, I’m always ready to spread good news. This is the final part of the series, a report on the current state of theater in Atlanta, Georgia. It was preceded by reports on theater in Washington, D.C. (5 October) and theater in Los Angeles (8 October).]
AT’s Introduction to “A Tale of Three Cities”
In looking around the U.S. in anticipation of a busy 2026-27 theatre season, we decided to tell the stories of three major theatrical hubs: Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. In exploring the unique challenges each community has faced and overcome, we’re also looking for the lessons these cities might hold for the national theatre field. Amid controversy and chaos, shifting real estate landscapes, changing audience behavior, and fickle funding, all three theatre scenes have much to celebrate and to look forward to.
“A TALE OF THREE
CITIES: THE ATLANTA WAY”
by Jim Farmer
[Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 1837 as Terminus (because it was the endpoint for the Western & Atlantic Railroad) and by 1842, it was renamed Marthasville to honor Governor Wilson Lumpkin’s (1783-1870; 35th Governor of Georgia: 1831-35) daughter Martha (1827-1917). In 1845, with a population of about 2,500 residents, it was incorporated as Atlanta (in reference to the Western & Atlantic).
[Because Atlanta was a major railroad hub, traveling troupes touring between New York, New Orleans, and the coastal South found it incredibly easy to stop and perform there. Three prominent 19th-century playhouses served as the primary stages for these national traveling companies.
[Atlanta’s very first proper theater was The Athenaeum, built in 1854, when the city was less than ten years old. Before the Civil War (1961-65) disrupted national tours, traveling stock companies stopped there to perform Shakespeare, minstrel shows, comedies, and early operatic recitals. It served as the artistic anchor of the antebellum frontier town until the city was burned in 1864.
[DeGive’s Opera House (opened 1870) was built during the Reconstruction era (1865-77) by Laurent DeGive (1828-1910), Belgian consul in Atlanta (1860-1905). This venue became Atlanta’s premier cultural hub for over two decades. DeGive transformed the unfinished building into a magnificent auditorium that seated over 2,000 patrons.
[Because the opera house sat directly on the major southern rail lines, it hosted the leading traveling talent of the late 19th century. Oscar Wilde spoke here during his famous 1882 American lecture tour and the theater hosted opera companies, standard dramatic troupes, and orchestral performances until it was converted to other theatrical uses in the 1890s.
[As Atlanta entered the “Gilded Age” (ca. 1870-98), DeGive built an even more opulent successor, DeGive’s Grand Opera House (opened 1893), to replace his original house. Opening with David Belasco’s (1853-1931; theatrical producer, impresario, director, and playwright) play Men and Women (1890), it was praised by city leaders as a masterpiece that rivaled the theaters of Paris and New York.
[The Grand Opera House confirmed Atlanta as an indispensable stop for national touring productions, including the New York Metropolitan Opera’s annual touring circuit. The theater was sold to Marcus Loew's (1870-1927; business magnate and a pioneer of the motion picture industry) organization in 1916 and eventually became a dedicated movie house before tragically burning down and being demolished in the late 1970s; the world premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind played there in 1939.
[Over the past few decades, Atlanta has evolved from a destination for touring Broadway shows into a powerhouse for world premieres, culturally specific narratives, and community-driven storytelling. Today, the city’s theater scene thrives through a dual identity: a deeply rooted base of homegrown regional theater companies and a nascent, rapidly growing movement celebrating Native American artistic voices.
[Atlanta’s modern “homegrown” theater took root during the post-1960s civil rights era and arts boom. Rather than relying on traveling troupes, local artists established resident companies to cultivate distinct Southern voices. The establishment of the local scene began with the founding of the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre in 1968 (as the Atlanta Municipal Theatre) as part of the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, which opened that year. (Alliance won the Regional Theatre Tony Award in 2007.)
[Subsequently, Theatrical Outfit, Atlanta’s second-oldest non-profit professional theater, opened in 1977, eventually finding a home downtown in the historic Balzer Theater at Herren's to focus strictly on theatrical works that define, critique, and explore the American South. (Herren’s was a beloved Atlanta restaurant that closed in 1987; the space reopened in 2005 as a state-of-the-art performance space.)
[TO and other Atlanta theaters strove to expand the “Southern canon” from the likes of classics like Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy (1987), or stage adaptations of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) to include plays such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) or Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944).
[Through initiatives like TO’s Made-in-Atlanta new play development program, the theater is actively commissioning and producing new stories to redefine what a "Southern narrative" actually is. This includes world premieres like Young John Lewis (premiered at TO in 2025; see also “Three Major Theatrical Hubs: Washington, D.C.” [5 October 2026])], a hip-hop musical by Psalmayene 24, an award-winning, D.C.-based playwright, director, actor, and pioneer of “hip-hop theater” (born Gregory Morrison and known in the theater community as “Psalm”), exploring the early activism of the legendary congressman.
[Other plays like Lee Osorio’s Providence Canyon (premiered by 7 Stages Theatre, 2022), which looks at the haunted legacies and complexities of illegal immigration in the region; and Megan Tabaque’s Marry Me, Bruno Mars (developmental debut at Theater Emory’s [Emory University] Brave New Works Festival, 2021), which centers Asian-American identity in recent Atlanta suburban history, were developed and workshopped in the Theatrical Outfit’s Made-in-Atlanta program.
[As the city expanded, alternative spaces opened up to push aesthetic boundaries. 7 Stages Theatre (1979) and Horizon Theatre Company (1983) were established to focus on raw, provocative, and freshly scripted contemporary work.
[Atlanta’s rich African-American theater tradition, deeply intertwined with the city's historical role as a hub for Black intellectual life, civil rights activism, and higher education, can be traced back to the early 20th century and its emergence as a thriving epicenter of Black business and culture.
[Historically, local Black communities created performance venues during segregation out of sheer necessity. A prime example is the historic Ashby Street Theatre, which opened in 1934; it originally served as a vital entertainment haven for Black Atlantans.
[Atlanta’s Black theater impulse was sustained and institutionalized by the Atlanta University Center (created in 1929)—a collaboration among four historically black colleges and universities (Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and the Morehouse School of Medicine) which acted as cultural greenhouses, training generations of Black playwrights, actors, and directors who would eventually form the bedrock of the city's professional theater boom.
[While early 20th-century troupes paved the way, the professionalized Black Arts Movement in Atlanta exploded in the 1970s and 2000s. Jomandi Productions, founded in 1978 through an endowment from Morehouse College, grew to become Georgia's oldest and largest Black theater company. In later years, it shifted its focus away from a traditional mainstage season toward educational outreach, legacy projects, and touring presentations, but it laid the direct groundwork for every Black theater company in Atlanta today.
[The New African Grove Theatre Company, founded in 2000 and named after the very first known Black theater company in U.S. history (the African Grove Theatre opened in New York City in 1821), was created strictly to preserve “the total Black experience” from historical works to present-day narratives. The company continues to produce plays, musicals, and community workshops that highlight African American history and contemporary life.
[In 2002, Broadway director Kenny Leon (6 directing Tony nominations, including 1 win for A Raisin in the Sun [2014]) founded True Colors Theatre Company, sealing Atlanta's reputation as a national cradle for professional Black storytelling. (Prior to True Colors, Leon had been artistic director of Alliance Theatre since 1990.) True Colors was specifically designed to preserve the traditional African American classics (such as August Wilson’s century cycle) while championing bold, contemporary Black playwrights.
[True Colors Theatre Company is one of the premier African American theater companies in the United States, driving Atlanta's reputation as a vital launching pad for Black dramatic arts. Alongside innovative spaces like Synchronicity Theatre (launched as Synchronicity Performance Group in 2000), the modern landscape prioritizes new work development, community dinners, and interactive social justice discussions.
[Historically underserved in Southern regional theater, Native American and Indigenous stories have taken center stage in Atlanta through dedicated partnerships and cultural festivals.
[Hosted by the contemporary 7 Stages Theatre, the annual First Voices Festival is a pillar for the local Indigenous scene. Produced in collaboration with Turtle Island Trading Company, an Indigenous-owned cultural business, retail storefront, and community hub, and the Zintkala Zi PowWow, an Indigenous cultural organization and performance group, the festival features Muscogee (Creek) storytelling, traditional music, and staged live performances that honor the ancestral stewards of the land and uplift marginalized voices.
[The First Voices Festival was established in November 2022, initiating the emergence and distinct footprint of the modern Native American performance movement in Atlanta. The festival grew from a single-day gathering into a multi-day event. It now weaves together theatrical world premieres, multi-media presentations addressing critical social topics, and the first authentic outdoor powwows hosted directly within Atlanta’s city limits.
[Because there are no theaters or resident companies in the Atlanta area exclusively dedicated to Native American or Indigenous performance, Indigenous cultural groups embed themselves into the seasons of existing multi-cultural spaces, integrating Indigenous narratives directly into the mainstream regional theater ecosystem.
[Jim Farmer’s “The Atlanta Way” was published in American Theatre vol. 43, no. 1 (Fall 2026) and was posted at AMERICAN THEATRE | The Atlanta Way on 28 September 2026]
Despite challenges with funding and perception, theatre in Georgia’s capital city is eclectic and vibrant.
A night out at the theatre in Atlanta might mean a star-studded production aimed for a Broadway run, a sophisticated children’s (or adult) puppet show, or an edgy world premiere at a small theatre. The city’s eclectic and, many locals would say, underrated scene includes companies specializing in musicals, Shakespeare, LGBTQ fare, improv, Black theatre, regional bows, and scores of world premieres.
Best known outside Atlanta is surely the Alliance Theatre, the $25 million giant that took home a Regional Theatre Tony Award in 2007 and helped launch such Broadway properties as The Color Purple, The Prom, Maybe Happy Ending, and Water for Elephants. Yet the area is peppered with dozens of other theatre establishments, big and small, each producing rich fare for local audiences throughout the year.
[The Color Purple premiered at the Alliance Theatre in 2004 and debuted on Broadway in 2005. It’s had several national tours, regional and international productions, and a 2015 Broadway revival; it was released as a musical film in 2023. The Prom tried out at the Alliance in 2016 and premiered on Broadway in 2018. It’s had a National Tour in 2021 and a Mexico City production in 2022.
[Maybe Happy Ending is a bi-national musical, conceived by a South Korean lyricist and musical theater writer, Hue Park (b. 1983), and co-written with William Aronson (b. 1981), a composer and writer for musical theater. Two versions of the play were created, Korean and English (with some differences between them). The Korean version premiered in Seoul in 2016, with numerous revivals ensuing and a film version streamed online three times in 2021.
[The English version debuted at the Alliance in 2020 and then opened on Broadway in 2024. It won six Tony Awards for Best Musical, Book, Score, Actor, Direction, and Scenic Design, plus six Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical, Music, Lyrics, and Book. The musical is still running, with 28 previews and 790 regular performances as of 4 October 2026.
[Water for Elephants premiered at the Alliance in 2023 and opened on Broadway on 21 March 2024; the show closed on 8 December 2024, after playing 25 previews and 300 regular performances. The show was nominated for eight Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical, but won none.]
Like their counterparts around the country, though, Atlanta theatre artists are dealing both with field-wide challenges and with ones unique to them and their region.
“The economics of Broadway are the same as regional theatre,” explained Lisa Adler, co-artistic/producing director of Horizon Theatre, a Little Five Points troupe with a focus on Southern writers; their current offering, Kira Rockwell’s Holy Chicken Sandwich [21 August-19 September 2026 (world premiere)], is a spoof of Chick-fil-A. “Expenses are going up, but you can’t keep pushing ticket prices up, otherwise you are narrowing your audience, and you can’t expect donations to go up. That is the difficult place that we are in.”
Matt Torney, artistic director of Theatrical Outfit, one of the city’s oldest companies, confirmed that expenses have escalated. A sheet of plywood that used to cost $11 now costs $47, said Torney, whose theatre is known for contemporary and classic works, as well as their recent hip-hop musical Young John Lewis.
Another field-wide challenge, post-Covid lockdown and reopening: changing audience behavior. For many theatres, the rhythm of automatic subscription renewals ahead of a season is gone. “We sell subscriptions throughout the year, or maybe for two shows,” said Torney. “People buy at the last minute. They walk up and buy tickets. The predictability of audience behavior is completely gone.” Indeed, he said he sees no regular cadence in attendance.
Rachel May, co-founder and producing artistic director of Synchronicity Theatre, which presents work to uplift women and girls, concurred. “We used to have a lot we could plan on, and now we don’t,” she says. “It’s hard to predict moment to moment. We used to have a good sense of what things would look like. That makes us more vulnerable to things happening in the community.”
Funding Focus
Ask almost anyone in the Atlanta area about the most significant challenge facing local theatres and you’ll get the answer: a scarcity of philanthropic support, and of funding in general. The unpleasant reality is that, despite a robust theatre and arts community throughout Metro Atlanta and around the state, Georgia has some of the lowest state arts funding in the nation. Indeed, Georgia and Wisconsin regularly trade places on the bottom rung in terms of per capita legislative appropriations to state arts agencies. What about private foundations? That can also be tricky, many say.
“From my vantage point, one of the biggest challenges facing Atlanta theatre is the state of arts philanthropy, particularly at the foundation level,” said Freddie Ashley, artistic director of West Midtown’s Actor’s Express, a company known for presenting classics, musicals (including a superb version of A Strange Loop [2019] last year [24 July-31 August 2025]), and new voices. “There are also a lot of foundations that have shifted their focus areas away from the arts.”
Many local theatre artists are working with Arts Capital Atlanta, a citywide advocacy group, which aims to raise $100 million for Metro Atlanta’s arts community by approaching foundations and corporations. While participants are gung-ho, it has been a protracted process. “Some foundations are slower to change,” said Ashley. “I don’t think there is a lack of caring or enthusiasm” on the part of arts and culture advocates; the issue is that this enthusiasm is “not being generated from inside the philanthropic community.”
Ashley, however, does feel fortunate in Atlanta to have what he calls “robust city and county support.” (Atlanta is in Fulton County, which allocated $3 million in arts support for 2026.)
Simply put, funding is key to everything, according to Anthony Rodriguez, now the executive director of the South Forsyth County Community Improvement District, as well as the co-founder and artistic director emeritus of Aurora Theatre, a Lawrenceville troupe that smartly balances comedy and drama, with a large helping of musicals as well. As someone who sits on many kinds of boards (including Aurora’s), Rodriguez knows it’s hard all over for nonprofit organizations.
“The arts are lumped into luxury instead of being an important piece of what makes society work,” Rodriguez lamented, naming the goal of society as being a place “where we can see things we disagree with through a communal lens and talk about them, without getting angry and raising the temperature so high we can’t look at one another.”
As the artistic director of True Colors Theatre Company, one of Atlanta’s few theatre companies dedicated to work by Black playwrights, Jamil Jude—who took over when founder Kenny Leon stepped down in 2019—knows the importance of individual donations, especially now, though that resource has not been fully tapped. In a city the size of Atlanta, he’s confident that there is a lot of money out there for the arts. “I believe in the next 10 years, we will have people who want to focus on that,” Jude said. “But it will take some intention.”
[The Atlanta metropolitan area had an estimated population in 2025 of 6.48 million residents. That’s just 20,000 more than metro Washington, D.C.’s population and 6.4 million under metro L.A.’s population.]
Space Scramble
Another local trend over the last several years: theatre companies having headaches with venues, including losing them altogether. For more than 30 years, Georgia Ensemble Theatre performed at the Roswell Cultural Arts Center, but when the city of Roswell decided not to renew the company’s contract in 2023, the company moved, first to Marietta’s Jennie T. Anderson Theater, then to Act3 Playhouse in Sandy Springs.
[When a theater company moves from an established location to another space, even if it’s not far away, it tends to lose a portion of its regular audience. Sometimes, that phenomenon can be devastating and some theater troupes end up closing down as a result. (Roswell is 22 miles north of downtown Atlanta. Marietta is 20 miles northwest of the city and 13 miles east of Roswell. Sandy Springs is 13-16 miles north of Atlanta and 17 miles east of Marietta.)]
Aurora Theatre, after working closely with the city of Lawrenceville on the $35 million Lawrenceville Arts Center, which opened in 2021, now faces a city mandate that they pay rent for performance spaces that were once free. And earlier this year, Synchronicity Theatre learned that its lease in Midtown Atlanta would not be renewed, and is currently looking for a new venue.
According to Rodriguez, Aurora co-founder and producing artistic director Ann-Carol Pence has announced her retirement, and will be in a transitional role until February 2027. The company has an interim artistic director and an interim executive director. “Finances are tough; we are looking at raising funds to get through the year,” Rodriguez admitted. “I don’t know how it will work out. I have to be at peace with what happens next. The theatre needs new blood and energy, and change needs to happen.”
Synchronicity’s May said she views all three situations as distinct; her theatre’s lease, for instance, was not at the mercy of a government agency, but was instead the casualty of commercial real estate. Still, what has happened at Aurora, she feels, is a cautionary tale for arts organizations about the long-term relationships they can build.
Ashley traces the problem to the closing of the Midtown Atlanta staple 14th Street Playhouse in 2014. The Woodruff Arts Center (which houses the High Museum of Art, the Alliance Theatre, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra) sold the multi-space venue to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2014, and SCAD in turn sold it to a megachurch in 2021.
“That venue was a centralized place where itinerant theatres and dance companies could perform,” Ashley said. “It was a branded space that everyone was familiar with in a great part of town. When it was lost, it decentralized where smaller theatres without a home could go.”
While there are other theatre spaces, such as Little Five Points’ 7 Stages, that do the heavy lift of hosting many companies without a home, Ashley said he still sees it as a perilous time. “I don’t see it lightening or getting better any time soon,” he said. “It seems like there are those pressure points in an already fragile ecosystem.”
Luckily, Ashley views the relationship of Actor’s Express with its venue at King Plow Arts Center as solid, as does True Colors’ Jude at the Southwest Arts Center. Paul Conroy, founder and producing artistic director of the LGBTQ-focused Out Front Theatre Company in West Midtown, said he has successfully apprised his landlord of the economic realities facing nonprofit and arts organizations these days.
The More Things Change
Another area of concern to many is what the city is offering on its various stages. In 2020, Jesse Green wrote a New York Times article titled “54% of the People. 12% of the Plays. Atlanta, Do We Have a Problem?,” highlighting the chasm between the city’s diversity and the relative paucity of Black plays and Black artists involved in the city’s theatres. The article certainly got the local theatre community talking, and later that year CREAT (Coalition for Racial Equity in Atlanta Theatre) and I.D.E.A. ATL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity in the Arts Atlanta) held a Town Hall for Racial Reckoning to discuss equity and balanced theatre.
Jude thinks there’s been a change in what he sees locally, pointing to more diverse programming at the Alliance, Theatrical Outfit, Actor’s Express, and Horizon. Torney concurred, noting that Theatrical Outfit has been partnering more with organizations like Dominion Entertainment Group on productions such as 2024’s A Raisin in the Sun.
For May, it’s a more mixed bag. “I think there has not been as much change as people would like to see,” she said. “Making sure our theatre looks like our city has always been our mission. I have seen some things that have been performative, and some things have been really real, with strong commitments and intention. I don’t know that the impact has gotten there for everyone. It’s something we need to continue to talk about and keep having hard conversations.”
A lot of theatre artists made declarations of support for diversity in 2020; some companies have followed through, and others haven’t. “I don’t see the needle having moved significantly,” Ashley said. “Those organizations who have historically cared about representation took 2020 as the call to action that it should have been. Those organizations where it is not a central value or priority let it go.”
For her part, Horizon’s Adler was quite angry with the Times article, and still thinks of it as an attack piece on the South. She feels that Green targeted Atlanta for a problem that was nationwide, and ignored that the city has been on the leading edge of diversity for the field.
“We actually had people sitting side by side, Black and white, in our theatre, and if I go to Steppenwolf or the Goodman or anywhere in Chicago or Seattle, Philadelphia, that was not happening at the time,” Adler said. “I feel, if anything, we’ve been more aware because of the community we are in. We are in a community where half or more people are of color. You don’t have an audience if you don’t have that onstage.”
Despite the challenges, these companies have all survived and are busy planning for the future. Jude has two current big projects: finding a new managing director since Chandra Stephens-Albright’s departure, and planning this fall’s world premiere of Tank Stranger, written by Fat Ham playwright James Ijames, about a family healing itself to move forward. Torney is staging Fences in a co-production with Dominion and Alabama Shakespeare Festival in September, and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me next winter. At Actor’s Express, Ashley is preparing for Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy [see “Choir Boy (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)” (24 January 2015)] and Jayne Deely’s rolling world premiere of i never asked for a gofundme. Horizon has Kelundra Smith’s Other Paths to God in October, Out Front takes on Britney Spears with Once Upon a One More Time, and Aurora Theatre hopes the box-office sun will come up with Annie [see “Annie Live! (NBC, 2 December 2021)” (7 and 10 February 2022)]. Also on tap: 7 Stages’ First Voices Festival, a celebration of Indigenous cultures, in November, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose at the Alliance.
[The world premiere of Tank Stranger ran from 15 September to 4 October 2026 at True Colors. Fences was mounted from 16 September-11 October 2026 at the Balzer Theater in Atlanta and then will be restaged from 29 October-15 November 2026 at ASF in Montgomery, Alabama. What the Constitution Means to Me was at the Alliance Theatre from 24 February-21 March 2027.
[Choir Boy ran from 6-30 August 2026 at Actor’s Express, while i never asked for a gofundme premiered at the theater from 1-25 October 2026, to be remounted in new stagings at the Seattle Public Theater from 15 January-7 February 2027 and About Face Theatre in Chicago on dates to be announced in March 2027.
[Horizon Theatre Company’s production of Other Paths to God runs from 9 October-8 November 2026. Once Upon A One More Time at Out Front Theatre Company runs from 22 October-7 November 2026. Aurora Theatre’s Annie ran from 20 August-13 September 2026 at the Lawrenceville Arts Center.
[The fifth annual First Voices Festival in Atlanta will take place on 20 November 2026: Art of Activism (7 Stages Theatre), 21-22 November: Outdoor Powwow, and 27 November: The Doctrine film screening at the Plaza Theatre. Purpose at the Alliance was staged from 28 August-20 September 2026.]
Financial and real estate pressures aside, most Atlanta theatre artists feel positive about their city’s cultural future, even as they realize more challenges await. It is still a city with enormous reserves of talent and creativity, with large audiences hungry for the arts. For his part, Torney said he is eager to find a way to embrace and welcome future theatre generations.
As for Ashley, despite his somewhat gloomier pronouncements, he said he is dispositionally inclined to optimism.
“Atlanta has always been a somewhat inhospitable environment for the arts to flourish,” he said. “Yet Atlanta has one of the most dynamic ecologies in the entire country. That happens because of the talents and the disciplines and stick-to-it-ness of those in the community who make it work. I feel optimism that is not going away any time soon.
“It won’t be without its challenges,” he continued. “Do I think we will lose a few more organizations? Probably, unless things change drastically. Will we lag behind in philanthropy? Probably. But Atlanta always finds a way through it.”
[Jim Farmer is an award-winning, Atlanta-based arts reporter and an editor-at-large for ArtsATL, a nonprofit digital publication based in Atlanta dedicated to coverage of the local arts and culture scene. Farmer’s work can be seen in Georgia Voice, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta magazine, and other publications.]
