Creative Greensboro Annual Report 2025-26

2025 2026

ANNUAL REPORT CREATIVE GREENSBORO

CREATIVEGREENSBORO.COM • 336-373-2026 • GREENSBORO CULTURAL CENTER • 200 N. DAVIE ST., SUITE 101

What We Made Possible Together

Two-time Oscar Award-winning costume designer Ruth Carter and CCEO Jackie Boone during a CultureWorks artist talk.

A NOTE FROM Jackie

Creativity is an economic and community asset and Creative Greensboro endeavors to make that asset work for our city. We invest in the artists, organizations, spaces, and ideas that make Greensboro distinctive, while building a stronger creative economy that generates opportunity, activates places, attracts people, and strengthens the community. This year’s success reflects what is possible when creativity connects to opportunity. Together with the City Council, Cultural Affairs Commission, City Manager’s Office, and our many community partners, we are advancing arts and culture as a powerful tool for economic development, placemaking, and quality of life. We are positioning Greensboro as a city where creativity doesn’t just happen. It drives us forward.

JOCQUELYN BOONE City of Greensboro Chief Creative Economy Officer

Jocquelyn Boone

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Cover photo courtesy of Suzanne Snuggs Photography

Jocquelyn Boone Chief Creative Economy Officer Jake Neal Building Manager Naomi Woods Community Partnerships Coordinator, Internal Karen Archia Community Partnerships Coordinator, External Todd Fisher Performing Arts Coordinator Meredith Gornto Music Programming & Operations Coordinator Azzarea Tureaud-Borin Marketing Specialist (not pictured) Abi Mowbray Van Dyke Performance Space Operations Specialist ADMINISTRATIVE TEAM Catena Bergevin , Chair Victoria Milstein , Vice Chair Douglas Bender Juliette Bianco Jocelyn Brown Cyril Howell Leigh Ann Little Yolanda Ramos Miranda Sasha Woods Irving Allen , City Council Liaison CULTURAL AFFAIRS COMMISSION

We may be only one office, but we employ many ways to invest in creativity, develop talent, provide space, expand access, and bring Greensboro to life. CREATIVE GREENSBORO PROGRAMS AND OPPORTUNITIES • Invest & Support — Sustaining Creativity Community Partners Grants • Sustaining Creativity Tenant Partner Program • Neighborhood Arts • Art in Public Spaces Program • Create & Develop — Short Tales Programming • Teen Shakespeare Programming • Summer Musical • Evening of Short Plays • NC Playwrights' Forum • Neighborhood Arts: Next Up • Residency in the Hyers • GROW Residency • Provide Space — Van Dyke Performance Space Rentals • Creative Activation Partner Program • Creative Greensboro Music Studio Rental Program • Connect & Expand Access — Culture Pass • First Friday Programming • Activate & Celebrate — MUSEP • Music Ensemble Programming • CultureWorks • SonnetFest • Downtown Arts How We Put Creativity to Work

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What We Made Possible Together

PUBLIC EXPERIENCES 39,000

Throughout the year, Creative Greensboro brought people together through performances, exhibitions, festivals, workshops, and other cultural experiences that activated spaces across our city. The more than 39,000 creative and audience experiences demonstrate the power of arts and culture to connect communities, energize places, and contribute to a vibrant Greensboro.

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Flamenco dancers perform for First Friday Hispanic Heritage celebration, October 2025.

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Countless Ideas, One Growing Creative Economy

A Thousand Artists Supported Creative Greensboro connects artists to the spaces, resources, audiences, and opportunities that move creativity from idea to impact, which fuels Greensboro’s cultural vitality and fortifies the creative workforce that helps our city thrive. By investing directly in artists, Creative Greensboro strengthens the people at the heart of our creative economy.

Karena “Kidd” Graves kicked off the 2026 Greensboro Residency for Original Works (GROW) season by transforming Greensboro’s African American stories and traditions into tapestries that celebrated the city’s cultural memory.

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Creative Work Deserves Compensation

Talent has value, and investing in it matters. In the 2025-2026 fiscal year, Creative Greensboro put $450,000 directly into the hands of artists, creative workers, and cultural organizations. It turned public investment into paid, creative opportunities that support livelihoods, strengthen organizations, and keep creative dollars circulating in our community. When creatives get paid, Greensboro’s creative economy gets stronger.

Poet Laureate Program Creative Greensboro manages the City’s Poet Laureate Program, which promotes the art of poetry and literacy. James Daniels, the 2026 2028 Poet Laureate, led free, citywide programs and curated the City’s annual Poetry Month celebration during First Friday programming at the Greensboro Cultural Center in his first year as Greensboro’s Poet Laureate.

Titus Gant of the Titus Gant School of Music and Jazz, a 2025–2026 Sustaining Creativity grantee, works alongside the next generation of Greensboro musicians. Photo courtesy of Gant School of Music and Jazz

DIRECT FINANCIAL SUPPORT to creative individuals and nonprofit organizations $450K

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A Home For Creative People

The Greensboro Cultural Center is more than a building, it’s creative infrastructure and home to 17 creative nonprofits, the GROW and HYERS residencies, and low cost studio rental opportunities for individual creatives. Through deeply subsidized tenant partnerships and affordable studio space, Creative Greensboro provides artists and cultural organizations with the space and resources to create, operate, collaborate, and serve the public — turning City-owned space into an investment in Greensboro’s creative sector. Greensboro Cultural Center tenants generated more than $6.1 million in reported economic activity in the 2025-2026 fiscal year, supported hundreds of workers and paid creatives, and engaged more than 637,000 patrons.

Center for Visual Artists Exhibition Opening.

Photo courtesy of Center for Visual Artists

FY 2025-26 Tenant Impact Snapshot GREENSBORO CULTURAL CENTER TENANT PARTNERS

$6.1M+ Reported Economic Activity

Includes $4.26M in compensation + $1.86M spent locally

Creative-economy infrastructure in action.

Tenants convert public cultural space into jobs, paid creative work, local publishing, programming, and public access.

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$1.86M 75,000 637,000

EMPLOYEES AND CONTRACT WORKERS SUPPORTED

DOCUMENTED YOUTH ENGAGEMENTS

3,400 1,400

ARTISTS AND CULTURAL WORKERS PAID

PARTICIPANT AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENTS

PROGRAMS AND CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

SPENT WITH GREENSBORO BUSINESSES AND SERVICE PROVIDERS

Note: Reported economic activity is not a formal economic-impact analysis. Figures based on self-reported FY25-26 data from 14 tenant partners.

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African American Atelier, Inc. Art Alliance of Greensboro The Arts Council of Greater Greensboro Thank You Cultural Center Tenant Partners Dance Project, Inc. GreenHill Center for NC Art Greensboro Ballet Greensboro Community Television Greensboro Downtown Parks, Inc. Greensboro Opera Greensboro Symphony Orchestra Guilford Native American Association IAlign Dance Casa Azul of Greensboro Center for Visual Artists

Access to Space is Access to Opportunity

In the 2025-2026 fiscal year, more than 400 artists, organizations, and community partners accessed Creative Greensboro spaces through the Creative Activation Partners Program, Van Dyke Performance Space rentals, music studios, and creative residencies. Every rehearsal, meeting, recording session, class, and performance represents an opportunity to practice, create, produce, perform, and grow. When creative people access performance and practice space, they have greater access to opportunity.

GREENSBORO ARTS & CULTURE ECONOMIC IMPACT

3,629

JOBS SUPPORTED

TAX REVENUE GENERATED $33.3M

$235.3M

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

Data from 2022 published in the Americans for the Arts 2023 Arts and Economic Prosperity 6 Study.

NC Folk Festival The Choral Arts Collective Triad Pride Performing Arts

Kaloum Djembe and LaMoves Afro-Blendz perform during the Festival of Lights, December 2025.

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Partnership Turns Ideas Into Impact

Creative Greensboro’s partnerships are central to its operation. By collaborating with partners in higher education, public schools, neighborhood associations, community groups, businesses, cultural organizations, and studio space partners, we expand where creativity happens, whom it reaches, and what we accomplish together. Our partnerships extend the impact of arts and culture far beyond any single program or place.

Through her Neighborhood Arts program “Community Art in Transit: Stories of Home and Hope,” muralist Sachi Dely guided a series of storytelling sessions with students from the New Arrivals Institute, creating space for reflection, connection, and belonging. Together, these objects became more than keepsakes; they became powerful expressions of identity, resilience, hope, and the enduring ties to family, culture, and community. 10

2025–2026 Community Art Partners & Neighborhood Stakeholders

Creativity Rooted in Space. Shaped by Community. Creative Greensboro pioneered a community centered approach to community art placemaking and placekeeping in the city—putting resources directly into the hands of artists and residents to shape the places they call home. Today, more than 36 community artworks across Greensboro reflect the stories, values, identities, and spirit of our neighborhoods, which creates a growing cultural footprint that is distinctly Greensboro.

Smithsonian American Art Museum Weatherspoon Arts Museum African American Atelier New Arrivals Institute Greensboro Mutual Aid East White Oak Community Center The People’s Market Piedmont Blues Preservation Society Dance Project Art Alliance Peck Elementary Alderman Elementary Bluford STEM Elementary Peeler-Hampton Visual and Performing Arts Elementary NC A&T State University UNC Greensboro

Artist Emilio Marz served as a professional mentor artist for Creative Greensboro's Neighborhood Arts: Next Up program, and teamed up with young artist Zion Jones to design a neighborhood bus shelter for Kings Forest.

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Downtown Arts Special Commission

Local artist Monica Hilario’s “Gate City, Carried Forward” explores Greensboro’s connection with nature, people, technology, and our shared future. The 10-by-20-foot work is displayed at the Melvin Municipal Office Building through July 2027.

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Downtown Arts: Gate City, Carried Forward

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From First Experiences to Real-World Skills

Young people from ages eight to 24 can create, explore, and grow with Creative Greensboro. Through performing and visual arts, youth develop their creative voice, build transferable skills onstage and behind the scenes, and gain hands-on experience, including opportunities to apprentice alongside professional artists.

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Short Tales 2026 - “The Missing Lunch Box”

The Numbers Tell One Story. People Tell The Rest.

Behind every program, grant, partnership, and creative opportunity is a person whose experience was shaped by the work. In their own words, artists, partners, and participants share what access, investment, and connection can mean and why supporting creativity matters to Greensboro.

Your company of young actors took on a powerful work in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The play made me think about how the story connects to events going on in our country and the world. I believe the work contributes to developing a well-informed audience and community. I witnessed awesome storytelling that was exciting, clear, and compelling.

— Willie Jordan Patron

— Lily Oatis Neighborhood Arts: Next Up Youth Artist & bus shelter artwork designer in the Glenwood neighborhood I love that we were able to actually go out in the community, to be able to interact with people, see the environment, and get inspiration from that. Also, partnering with a mentor who looked like me, another Black woman, was very, very important. I also enjoyed opportunities after the program to speak about my art and connect with more communities. That was very special.

The CAP Program has allowed me to feel like there is City investment in my work as a professional dance artist, which is more valuable than you may realize. I have been so impressed with the quality of flooring offered in studios 403 and 413, specifically, wooden dance floors. As an independent professional dancer based in Greensboro, there is no "center" for professional dance, so to know that the Cultural Center offers subsidized rental rates of studios makes my work as a self-funded artist sustainable.

— Caitlyn Schrader Dancer

Photo courtesy of Hannah Long

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