By Spelman College
Spelman College recently received a $1 million gift from The Shubert Foundation to support an endowed scholarship for students majoring in theater and performing arts.
The scholarship will allow future theater professionals to graduate with less debt, ready to step into their creative careers.
“Spelman College is honored to receive such a generous endowment gift from the Shubert Foundation in support of the developing theater artistry of women of color,” said Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, President, of Spelman College. “With the College’s expansion and renewal of our theaters and performing spaces underway, the support of our promising young students is the perfect complement.”
As the College continues to enhance its ARTS@Spelman initiative, funding to support academic innovation through teaching and learning remains a top priority.
Established in 2015, the ARTS@Spelman initiative, which includes the departments of Art and Visual Culture, Theater & Performance, Dance Performance & Choreography, Music, the Digital Moving Image Salon, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and the Spelman College Innovation Lab, was developed to re-conceptualize? the academic curriculum to best meet the needs of a 21st century liberal arts institution.
Spelman’s Department of Theater & Performance offers creative and inquisitive scholars an opportunity to explore performance, writing and design through experimentation and exploration. This interdisciplinary approach to performance offers a gateway to multifaceted opportunities in performance, theater studies and the creative industries. Students enrolled in the program are encouraged to experiment with performance modalities to develop and create original stories.
In 2021, Spelman announced plans to develop the LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson Performing Arts Center. The new space will include a renovated theater, lobby, dressing rooms and supporting areas for performance artists. The news space will be located in the John D. Rockefeller Fine Arts Building.
At the height of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, actress-producer-director LaTanya Richardson Jackson, C’71, was honing her significant talents on the stage of the Baldwin Burroughs Theatre in Spelman’s John D. Rockefeller Fine Arts Building. She performed, alongside then Morehouse College student, Samuel Jackson, as a member of the Morehouse Spelman Players in productions like “The Sale” by Pearl Cleage, C’71. Their auspicious debut in plays produced by Spelman’s Department of Drama catapulted the couple into award-winning careers spanning nearly 50 years of artistic excellence and theatrical success.
In addition to improvement to on-campus theater facilities, the College recently broke ground on the Mary Schmidt Campbell, Ph.D. Center for Innovation and the Arts, an 84,000-square-foot interdisciplinary environment that supports and advances experimentation, collaboration, active play, research and the imaginative use of digital technologies.
The Shubert Foundation was established in 1945 by Lee and J.J. Shubert, in memory of their brother, Sam. Today, the Foundation is the nation’s largest funder of unrestricted aid for not-for-profit theatre and dance companies. Since the establishment of the Shubert Foundation grants program in 1977, over $575 million has been awarded to not-for-profit organizations throughout the United States. In 2022, The Shubert Foundation awarded a record total of $37.6 million to 609 not-for-profit performing arts organizations and leading academic theatre programs across the nation.
