What we do

New Room Studios (NRS) provides bedrock support and capacity building for artistic projects, incubates and nurtures community arts programs, and helps artists produce new work. This new nonprofit focuses on projects and programs of high artistic quality that advance equity and justice in our communities, so we can help build a more dynamic and diverse arts ecosystem. 

NRS actively discovers what keeps artists (and prioritizing BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Disabled artists) from producing the work they want to produce and having the practices they want to have, and we will work with them to overcome those barriers. We talk with artists and we conduct surveys and focus groups of artists to learn what would help them most, and we publish what we learn so that the community as a whole can be more responsive to their needs.

We will provide services to a wide array of artists, and we will deliver more focused and intensive support to our resident artists and arts groups, who are selected by a rotating majority-BIPOC group of Artistic Principals, all of whom are Oregon- and Southwest Washington-based working artists and arts administrators.