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Wallace Foundation Project

Building Sustainable Audiences for the Arts

Cultivating interest in new, non-narrative dance works

Ballet Austin is one of 25 performing arts organizations chosen to participate in The Wallace Foundation’s Building Audiences for Sustainability effort, a six-year, $52-million initiative aimed at developing practical insights into how arts organizations can successfully expand their audiences. Building Audiences for Sustainability continues the foundation’s 25-year history of support for the arts, with a particular emphasis on building audiences.

Representing a spectrum of organizations—from dance and opera companies to orchestras, theaters, and multidisciplinary arts institutions—the selected partners receive financial and technical support from the foundation to research and develop their audience-building work. The evidence gathered from these organizations will be documented and analyzed by an independent team of researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, providing valuable insights, ideas, and information for the entire field.

Learn more about Ballet Austin’s participation in this project, what we’re studying, what we’re learning and how we’re applying it leading up to and during our live performances.

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Ballet Austin has embarked on a multiyear project to develop audiences for new works. Backed by market research, they’ve upended assumptions about their audiences to generate ideas, test results, and launch new strategies to bring in more people to less familiar performances.

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