CELLUNOVA - NY Theater Financials

A Study on NYC Non-Profit Theater Financials

Cellunova Research, Oct 2026

Section I. Introduction

Under the backdrop of NEA arts funding cut, shrinking revenue and rising cost across indie theater industry, there is a growing need to take a look at the financial health of various types of theater organizations in the NYC theater eco-system. To that end, we collected 990 filing data from ProPublica via their API. (ProPublica, 2026)

Section II. Methodology

We limit the research to the entities following criteria (which mimic the profile of Cellunova Productions):

State = NY
NTEE Code is in
- A65/A650 (Theater Production Companies with or without venues. Pure performing art venues are not included.)
- A20 (Arts And Culture)
- A60 (Performing Arts)
Tax Code = 501(c)3
It contains "Theater", "Theatre", "Productions" or "Art" in the description or name. (including the lower case and stemmed lexicon.)
City is in ['New York','Astoria','Brooklyn','Bronx','Long Island City'].

This criteria is loose enough to cover many important theaters that we benchmark to, but could also includes many that are loosely related to theater as A20/A60 are loosely defined.

Within this criteria, we obtained in total 407 companies, 280 in New York, 92 in Brooklyn, 16 in Astoria, 17 in Bronx and 2 in LIC. (Cellunova is the one among the 407 companies.)

However, along the 407 companies, only 265 have 990 filing records on ProPublica. Majority of the remaining are not new companies. As seen on the distribution plot on the right - some of them in fact are established in 20th century. At the time of writing, the latest snapshot available via API only contains filing up to year of 2024. Therefore, any company established at or after 2025 will not have fillings in this dataset, but it is still shocking to see 33% of the companies are not reporting its financials.

There are some theater companies that won't fit in the criteria above, such as NAATCO (no NTEE code) and Shakespeare Festival (No keyword) etc. So this study is not comprehensive.

Section III. How good is our data?

Subsection III.1 Filing with/without data.

Some filings were done non-electronically or without disclosure of the company financials. This typically happens in earlier years or in earlier days of a start-up theater company. For these filings, we do not have financial data readily available. Luckily, as seen in the Table below, starting from 2011, most of the companies have switched into filing with data, which could be due to the aftermath of Pension Protection Act of 2006. For the rest of the study, we only focus on the filing histories with data.

Subsection III.2 First and Last Filing Type

If we take a look at the recent first filing of a theater company, most of them are done through 990-EZ, which are filed for a public charity company with revenue < $50K. However, as it is generally difficult for a start company to meet the "public charity" test in the first year, they really should be classified as private foundation and should be filing 990-PF instead of 990-EZ. However, most of the companies opted for an easy (EZ) way out. Only in more recent years people start to file 990-PF at the start, like us, maybe as IRS tightens its regulations.

Another trend we see is that the number of newly founded theater companies shrinks slightly over the past decade, and especially after Covid, and the average existing theater companies will have an average of at least a decade of history.

We also take a look at the last filing of each company, and we notice that about half of the universe are still filing - and presumably alive. While it is unclear if ProPublica deletes the inactive companies, but judging from the fact that some companies only had the last filing around 2005, we believe the survivorship bias in this dataset is small here and in fact 70% of the theater companies that once filed are still alive (filing at or after 2021). This is on par with the statistics of public companies where 57% of the companies listed after 1996 are still alive today. (Blue Trust, 2023)

Section IV. Financial Data Analysis

Subsection IV.1 Overview

For this subsection, out of the 407 companies, we take a look at the 200 (exact!) companies that have filing with data after 2021, specifically at the last snapshot of their filing data.

The active universe have a bimodal distribution on its founding dates, consisting of a group of old theater companies that are founded in 1980s and another group of theater companies in the recent decade. In comparison to the first filing date of the full universe, we see a lot more alive companies that are more recently founded - aka, they have not weathered through the decade of storm yet. This is expected as only a few companies survive that long.

The distribution of Net Asset (Asset at End of Year - Liability at End of Year) is shown on the CDF plot. A whopping 17% of the companies have zero or negative net assets and only 14% of the companies have net asset > $1 million. The distribution is very much log-normal, with a median of $42K.

As theaters tend to balance the grants, donations, ticketing income with the production cost, we should expect revenue to be a bit higher in general compared to net asset, which is indeed the case. The median revenue is $150K and 18% of the companies have total revenue > $1 million. For the context, Cellunova have revenue of $30K in 2023 and $60K in 2024, and projected $80K in 2025 - we are getting there.

But one thing to notice here is the Asset Turnover Ratio (Revenue/Asset) is really high, with median of 1.43 and mean of 3.47, and highly positively skewed.

There is a also clear relationship between the founding year and the total revenue - with the older companies operating on a larger budget.

The cumulated donations and time effect makes trend even more obvious in the Net Asset chart.

Subsection IV.2 Funding Sources

One thing that surprised us is how little ticketing matters for most theater companies. Only about half of the companies under $5M report any ticket income at all, and for those who do, it is typically less than 10% of the budget - so growing a theater company is really about finding donors, not audiences. Government grants reach almost everyone, but they only make a real difference for the small companies, where they cover about a third of the budget (which makes them the most exposed to the NEA cuts). The large companies are a different animal: rent from their own venues and income from their investments make up about a quarter of their revenue.

These figures cover full Form 990 filers only; the smallest companies file the short 990-EZ, which does not break revenue down this way.

Section V. Theater Companies with a Venue

Theater companies with a venue are completely different beasts. The main study above searches by name keyword, which misses most of the city's established houses (The Public files as "New York Shakespeare Festival", La MaMa as a performing-arts center). This study looks at those houses directly: non-profit companies that produce or present theater in a venue they run. Venues that mainly rent space to outside productions are left out.

Unlike light-weighted theater production companies with less than $5M revenue, these heavy players' box office actually constitute a bigger proportion of their revenue (~24%). Asset to revenue ratio is also significantly higher at 63%. Things are able to scale well at this level. Houses also differ significantly on their investment strategies and returns.

The bigger story here is what happened after the Covid relief money ran out. In 2021, only 13% of the 30 venue companies ran a deficit; by 2023 that number jumped to a whopping 72%, and it was still 63% in 2024. The reason is simple: costs are back to 2019 levels, but ticket income is still only at 76% and donations are flat, so nothing is growing to fill the gap.

Size makes a big difference in who can weather this. The 9 companies with more than $10M in revenue have about a year of expenses in net assets beyond their building and cover almost half of their costs with earned income, while the 21 smaller ones have only about 3.6 months and typically run at a 5% loss - 12 of the 30 have less than 3 months of cushion. The losses are also concentrated: 13 of the 30 lost money over 2022-2025, led by Signature (-$12.4M), MTC (-$5.8M) and Theatre for a New Audience (-$3.5M).

Section VI. Conclusion

Well, it is a tough world out there. We are doing the best we can and we hope you join us on this wild journey!

References:

ProPublica. (2026). Nonprofit Explorer. Retrieved from https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
Urban Institute. National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) codes. Retrieved from https://urbaninstitute.github.io/nccs-legacy/ntee/ntee.html
Blue Trust. (2023) Why has the number of public companies declined? Retrieved from https://www.bluetrust.com/blogs/why-has-the-number-of-public-companies-declined/#:~:text=In%201996%20the%20number%20of,and%20new%20industries%20and%20technologies.

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