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'Concerning, Shortsighted, and Detrimental': Trump Attacks National Endowment for the Arts
"Creative expression is the lifeblood that vivifies a free and democratic culture," said the head of one nonprofit publisher. "Every story a writer tells is one Trump cannot control."
May 06, 2025
Arts institutions around the country expressed sadness and outrage after the Trump administration notified theaters, literary arts organizations, and other groups on Friday that their National Endowment for the Arts grants were being withdrawn or canceled. The message came the same day that U.S. President Donald Trump proposed eliminating funding for the independent federal agency.
"Any attempt to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)—by eliminating funding, reducing staff, or canceling grants—is deeply concerning, shortsighted, and detrimental to our nation," said CEO of Americans for the Arts, Erin Harkey, on Saturday. "NEA grants have touched every American, supporting projects in every congressional district and helping the arts reach parts of the country, including often overlooked rural communities."
According to NPR, which itself receives two NEA grants valued at $65,000, hundreds of groups across the country on Friday received a message from the NEA that grants offered for the 2025 fiscal year were being terminated or withdrawn. The email read, in part, "the NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president."
"Consequently," the email continued "we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities." According to NPR, the email states the president's priorities include projects that "celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence," "make America healthy again," and "foster skilled trade jobs," among others.
Impacted organizations have submitted information about their terminated or withdrawn NEA grants to a public tracker, which as of Tuesday afternoon lists over 200 groups. According to the spreadsheet, total funding revoked as of 3:00 pm Eastern Time tallied $5.9 million.
According to reporting from The Washington Post, it was not immediately clear whether the NEA is able to rescind grants it has already awarded, something that grantees who spoke to the outlet raised. The NEA was established by Congress in 1965 is the largest funder of arts and arts education countrywide, also according to the Post.
The move to revoke funding "not only threatens the stability of countless community-based programs but also places a heavy burden on smaller arts organizations that rely on consistent support to serve, educate, and inspire," wrote Lina Lindberg, a grant strategist, on LinkedIn on Tuesday.
The nonprofit publisher Electric Literature announced on Monday that its 2025 NEA grant was terminated, but struck a defiant tone in the public statement.
"Creative expression is the lifeblood that vivifies a free and democratic culture. Trump is obsessed with a heritage and legacy of his own imagination. For him, literature is forward facing and therefore dangerous. Every story, even about the past, is a new story. Every story a writer tells is one Trump cannot control," wrote the organization's executive director, Halimah Marcus. "Electric Literature will continue to publish culturally enriching stories about the past, present, and future with honesty and heart."
Portland Playhouse posted on Instagram that the administration had withdrawn the nonprofit theater's $25,000 NEA grant on the eve of the opening night of a production the funding was meant to support.
"To receive this news on the eve of opening night is deeply disappointing. While we have no plans currently to cancel our production, moving forward without the support of this critical funding presents a significant challenge for our company," the playhouse wrote. "We know we're not alone. Arts organizations across the country are grappling with reduced support at a time when the need for community, connection, and cultural expression is vital."
According to n+1's development director Dani Oliver, the magazine on Friday learned about the termination of its $12,500 2025 NEA grant "meant to help us pay our authors, our editors, and to have the magazine distributed to our readers."
"We're trying to stay optimistic, but with the administration's other announcement this week that the NEA might be shut down in its entirety, it's hard to do so," Oliver added.
Earlier Friday, Trump proposed completely getting rid of the NEA in his budget blueprint for fiscal year 2026.
Next to where the NEA appears in the budget, the document explains that "the budget includes the elimination of, or the elimination of federal funding for, the following small agencies."
In addition to NEA, Trump's budget also proposed eliminating funding for the National Endowment for Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The New York Timesreported Friday that "the proposal to eliminate the endowments drew a quick and furious reaction from Democrats."
The Times also reported that on Monday a group of senior officials at the NEA announced their resignations.
One observer, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, connected the grant terminations to the effort by Republicans in Congress to pass a round of tax cuts that will primarily benefit the wealthy. "The next thing Trump is trying to tear down: the arts," he wrote on X Tuesday. "All to fund tax cuts for billionaires."
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The Teacher: Filmed From the West Bank with Love and Rage
The movie tests its characters in ways most of us never will be challenged, leaving us wondering what we would choose if we lived under occupation.
Apr 24, 2025
Set in the hills of the West Bank, The Teacher, written and directed by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, tells the riveting story of Bassem (Saleh Bakri), a Palestinian high school English teacher struggling to inspire his students under the pall of Israel's occupation.
What’s it all for—the studying, the scholarship—if only to see armed settlers burn down your village olive trees and an Israeli government demolish your family home to make way for another illegal settlement? To the Palestinian teen who speaks in despair, as though old and tired with little for which to live, the middle-aged Bassem tells his student to return to his books to “regain control” in pursuit of an education that holds hope for a better life.
Although the film is Bassem’s journey of self-blame, newfound love, and quiet yet determined resistance, we also see events through the eyes of his prized student Adam (Muhammed Abed Elrahman), who becomes Bassem’s surrogate son replacing the one Bassem lost, the one we meet only through scenes that take us back in time.
Now—during the U.S.-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza and emboldened settler movement ripping through the West Bank—it is hard to imagine Nabulsi entering the Israeli-controlled West Bank to film The Teacher.
Blessed with looks and smarts, the surrogate son Adam pours over his books at a desk in the dirt outside overlooking the village destined for erasure. His home is gone. The tractor left only slabs of cement under which Adam recovers a desk, a couch, and a pair of binoculars that afford him advance notice of a looming threat or gut punch.
One measure of a good movie is whether you care about the characters or feel compelled to watch them, regardless of whether you agree with their choices or roles in the film, regardless of whether the character is a teacher invested in his students or a cunning Israeli intelligence officer who knows exactly which emotional button to push. For character development—raw, textured—The Teacher scores 10 out of 10, not only because Bassem is heroic, protective, and ultimately selfless but because both he and Adam are tested in ways most of us never will be challenged, leaving us wondering what we would choose if we lived under occupation—the scorched land of nighttime raids and vigilante violence, where our futures are not our own, where the fork in the road between self-defense and vengeance sometimes merges and where the greater good beckons us to hush creeping doubts. Would we remember The Teacher’s words: “Revenge eats away at you and destroys from the inside”?
Reviewers from legacy media—The New York Times, the LA Times—criticize the movie for having too many subplots. “But a teacher-student bonding narrative, a legal procedure, a family tragedy, a romance, and a kidnapping thriller are a lot to hang on one character,” writes NYT reviewer Ben Kenigsberg. “Nabulsi, unfortunately, muddles the story with multiple subplots, some inelegant acting, and contrived English-language dialogue,” writes the LAT’s Carlos Aguilar.
Did these movie critics see the same film this reviewer saw?
Such undeserved criticism suggests the writers are imposing their detached notion of reality on a drama that is all too real. The critics’ desire for a less complicated storyline with more refined dialogue suggests colonization of the art form rather than criticism. Strands of multifaceted characters must not be removed to suit cinematic preferences for a formulaic Hollywood blockbuster.
Conversations in The Teacher resonate as familiar even in the most unfamiliar surroundings, where rough-around-the edges Palestinian teens stereotype Lisa (Imogen Poots), the blonde British school counselor, as a mere do-gooder. “Miss United Nations has arrived,” joke the teens who call their teacher a “player” when between cigarette puffs he locks eyes with the British import. As for the subplots—the gun behind the bookcase, the woman who emerges in only a towel, the judge who delivers injustice—these are not disconnected B or C stories but deftly interwoven branches of the A story about survival and subterfuge under the boot of a brutal occupier. Life is not simple nor a singular line, certainly not when the path to decolonization can be uncertain and torturous, both for the colonized and the colonizer, though never in equal measure.
Nabulsi—who wrote the script in Britain during the Covid-19 lockdown and met with checkpoint delays during three months of filming in the West Bank—adds depth to her story when she introduces the subplot based on the abduction of Gilad Shalit, a former Israeli soldier held captive for over five years in Palestine before released in a hostage deal that freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. In one of the most compelling scenes in The Teacher, a U.S. American father, an Israeli resident whose son is held hostage by Palestinians, sympathizes with Bassem having lost a son, for in a metaphorical sense the American father also lost his son after the young man insisted the family emigrate to Israel following a Birthright Israel trip. Now the father, whose wife berates him—much as Basem’s wife berated her husband for failing to protect their son—finds himself a stranger in a strange land called Israel. No, he assures Bassem, he is not one of them, one of the heartless occupiers.
Nabulsi, the daughter of a Palestinian mother and a Palestinian-Egypian father, was born and raised in London, where she pursued a career in finance and worked for JPMorgan before becoming a filmmaker. She switched careers, from stocks to scripts, after visiting Palestine to trace her family history—a mother who fled to Kuwait following the 1967 war, a father who emigrated to London to study civil engineering.
Nabulsi’s short film The Present—also set in occupied Palestine and also starring Palestinian actor Bakri—was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA (British Academy Film Television Award). The Teacher—a suspenseful one hour and 55 minute drama—premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2023, just weeks before October 7. During shooting Nabulsi set up large black screens to cover actors playing IDF soldiers because she feared that if villagers thought the soldiers were real, a hurricane of heartache would ensue.
Now—during the U.S.-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza and emboldened settler movement ripping through the West Bank—it is hard to imagine Nabulsi entering the Israeli-controlled West Bank to film The Teacher. Fortunately, for us, the movie audience; for Palestine, the resistance; and for the solidarity movement, marchers across the globe, The Teacher can be livestreamed on several platforms or watched in theaters from coast to coast.
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As Broadway's Redwood Soars, Real Forest Canopies Are Vanishing
Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below.
Apr 22, 2025
A woman flees devastating personal loss and finds herself at the base of towering redwood trees in Northern California. There, she persuades two botanists to let her climb hundreds of feet above the forest floor into a hidden world that transforms her perspective—and her life. This isn't the latest adventure film or bestselling memoir. It's Redwood, Broadway's unlikely hit musical that's bringing attention to one of nature's most overlooked but critical ecosystems.
Many of us working in forest conservation and restoration management were delighted when it opened on Broadway. When a musical drives sold-out audiences to stand and cheer for characters climbing into a forest canopy, it creates a cultural moment that conservation science alone never could—bringing vital attention to something that most Americans never think to look up and notice.
As a child in the 1960s, I wandered among ancient redwoods, craning my neck upward in wonder, while my parents worked to establish Redwood National Park. My father, Edgar, who would later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his conservation work, and my mother, Peggy, who wrote about redwoods and the need to protect them and lobbying President John F. Kennedy's administration to do so, taught me that what made these giants special wasn't just their massive trunks but the entire living forest system from roots to crown. Those early lessons helped shape my life's work because what happens hundreds of feet above the forest floor matters more than most realize.
The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection.
These aerial systems represent nature's overlooked masterpiece—a complex world scientists call the "eighth continent." Redwood canopies host biodiversity found nowhere else. Leather-leaf ferns create massive mats—up to the size of cars—that can store 5,000 gallons of water per acre, keeping forests cool and moist during summer droughts. The dense foliage also captures fog moisture that sustains the entire forest below while creating microclimates that buffer against climate extremes.
Canopies contribute to the entire forest system, linking the top to the bottom of the forest. Dust captured in the abundant foliage of ferns and huckleberry plants combined with accumulated organic matter forms rich "aerial soil" that becomes the foundation for entire sky-high communities. Rare lichens, wandering salamanders, and small mammals thrive in this elevated habitat, maintaining delicate ecological balances. From these heights, the benefits cascade downward: Canopy cover shades streams, cooling water for salmon and other temperature-sensitive aquatic species, integrating the entire forest system from treetop to riverbed into a single, interconnected climate buffer.
Yet this hidden world faces a crisis. Only 5% of old-growth redwood forests remain and have intact canopy ecosystems. Young, secondary forests that are constantly harvested lack the structure—and are not allowed time to develop—to support these rich, diverse aerial worlds. Only the largest, oldest trees—many hundreds of years old—host these critical ecosystems, and they're increasingly rare.
But hope is taking root in innovative restoration work. Working with Cal Poly Humboldt's professor Stephen Sillett and research associate Marie Antoine, we have begun transplanting fern mats, collected from the forest floor after winter storms, into the tallest trees in secondary redwood forests we conserve and manage, rebuilding canopy ecosystems from scratch. Working in our Van Eck forest near Fieldbrook, California, we've nurtured these ferns and then "planted" them hundreds of feet high in trees that will remain permanently protected. These specially selected trees are designated as "Potentially Elite Trees" (PETs)—the giants of tomorrow. Individual old trees are a lot like the oldest elephants in a herd; they contain the wisdom and resources to help an otherwise young forest function as an old forest, just as those old elephants guide their herds. And, we continue to harvest timber on these forests—on average a million board foot a year—while restoring the structure and function of old forests.
Now, we are expanding our efforts, adding huckleberry to our plantings to support new sky gardens. This patient approach creates homes for birds, salamanders, and countless insects, jump-starting processes that would naturally take centuries.
Redwood captures an essential truth: Forests are not just timber resources. They're living systems with lessons to teach us about building resilience in an uncertain future.
The Broadway experience provides audiences a glimmer of what happens when people encounter these giants in real life—and that's critically important. The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection. But awareness must translate to action.
As debate rages on the role of federal forests and the need to protect their old and mature forests, there is also a major opportunity for action on private forests, where landowners' decisions will endure beyond a political cycle. For private forests, working forest conservation easements offer a proven path forward—providing landowners financial incentives to conserve and manage for older forests, develop complex structures, and designate future "PETs" that can support the function of old forests. This can transform forest recovery from centuries-long waits to achievable timelines within human lifespans.
Recent sweeping cuts to the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service workforce threaten our old forests. Rangers and scientists do more than protect and research forests—they guide visitors to witness these majestic ecosystems firsthand. These cuts, applied "like an ax rather than a scalpel", endanger both the health of our forests and the transformative experiences for the public. When people stand beneath ancient trees and look upward, they understand viscerally why these forests and their canopies must be protected.
Protecting and restoring these overlooked canopy ecosystems has never been more urgent as climate change accelerates. Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below. When audiences gasp as Idina Menzel spins and embraces that massive trunk, they glimpse not just theatrical magic but a vision of what we stand to lose—and what we must fight to restore and preserve. The living world above demands our attention, protection, and active restoration—not just in California's iconic redwoods, but in every forest ecosystem on Earth.
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