The Venturous Capital Grants program is designed to support writers of bold, experimental, and/or large-scale new plays by giving theaters the ability to say “yes” instead of “no” to writer-driven projects that are unusually heavy lifts, i.e., that are perceived as especially challenging.
Donor Name: Venturous Theater Fund
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 06/02/2025
Size of the Grant: Not Available
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
While they do not fund routine production costs, they offer grants to support specific extraordinary costs that might otherwise make venturous plays difficult or impossible to produce.
Eligible Expenses
- The expenses they fund must be:
- Extraordinary – beyond standard producing expenses;
- Integral – costs without which the play could not be produced; and
- Essential – they do not support enhancements to raise the level of production or to accommodate a particular production concept.
- These grants are intended to remove perceived obstacles to production by underwriting unusual expenses. Eligible extraordinary expenses typically include:
- Cast size—support for additional performers in large-cast productions
- Extraordinary technical requirements
- Additional production elements
- Unusual casting challenges
- Puppets, video, etc.
- Other expenses—you tell them.
Eligible Productions
They make grants to small and medium-sized not-for-profit theater companies to support productions of text-based, author-driven new plays that are
- ambitious in scale,
- epic in scope,
- challenging in form,
- controversial in subject matter,
- experimental in concept,
- (and/or) unabashed in their theatricality.
Eligibility Criteria
- Support is limited to productions at small- and medium-sized theaters with annual budgets of under $5 million.
- Theaters must be professional, independent producing organizations located within the U.S. that produce plays on Actors’ Equity Association contracts. They must be not-for-profit 501 (c) 3 organizations or be fiscally sponsored by a 501 (c) 3 organization.
- They support co-productions. However, all involved producing organizations, producing partners, and above-the-title entities must meet the criteria described above in order for a project to be eligible for support.
- They do not make grants to individual writers or non-producing organizations under this program.
For more information, visit Venturous Theater Fund.
