D.C. Colleges Mourn Kennedy Center Takeover

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has long been an asset to collegiate performing arts programs in Washington, D.C., giving students access to world-class performances as well as the opportunity to perform on its stages.

Over Daniel Abraham’s 27-year career as a music professor at American University, his institution’s various musical, dance and theatrical ensembles have appeared on the center’s hallowed stages more times than he can count.

That includes the AU Chamber Singers, which he conducts. The ensemble “has performed there off and on over the years,” he said. “Probably the most meaningful event I can remember was there was an inaugural Washington D.C. Choral Festival, for which we were a headline group.”

But those relationships are changing in the wake of President Donald Trump’s takeover of the institution. He replaced its board, took over as chairman, fired the center’s president and attempted to change its name to add his own. In the wake of those actions, a number of organizations have canceled programming at the Kennedy Center—including local colleges and universities and the American College Theatre Festival, the nation’s largest gathering of collegiate theater artists.

In December, shortly after Trump announced his preferred name for the center, ACTF wrote in a Facebook post that its National Committee had voted to “suspend” their affiliation with the Kennedy Center “due to circumstances and decisions that do not align with our organization’s values.”

Similarly, American University suspended a joint fellowship that allowed students in its arts management master’s program to work at the center. According to Abraham, the university’s performing arts department “started to be concerned about the continuity of those joint fellowships at least a full year ago, and made the decision to not move forward with any of the appointments this particular academic year.”

Unique Opportunities

Performing arts faculty in D.C. say the takeover of the Kennedy Center—and a planned two-year pause for renovations, slated to begin this summer—is a significant loss for students. Although D.C. is one of nation’s biggest performing arts towns, home to dozens of theaters and concert venues, the Kennedy Center brought special opportunities as the nation’s cultural center.

“We’re a relatively small department that’s dependent on funding from the university to program our own season. There are limitations in terms of budget [and] staff,” said Benjamin Harbert, chair of the performing arts department at Georgetown University, located walking distance from the Kennedy Center. “We do important work—we do work that we don’t have to worry about an audience coming in, and that’s a different kind of thing and that’s precious … but the Kennedy Center just does it on an institutional, professional and international level. We don’t have the bandwidth for that kind of thing.”

He credits the center with bringing artists like Jason Moran, an acclaimed jazz pianist who served as the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz from 2011 to 2025, into contact with Georgetown, where he served an artist in residence in 2017. Other artists performing at the center have also visited Georgetown’s campus while they were in town.

“What a wonderful opportunity for [Moran] to come and perform for us, come and visit classes, just be in dialogue with people—he wouldn’t have come if it was just Georgetown,” Harbert said. “Augmenting what Georgetown does on a scale and with the attention they have is something we’re really going to miss.”

But the loss also comes with a minor boon for universities: Some performers and organizations that don’t want to perform at the Kennedy Center under Trump’s leadership have shifted their performances to college campuses. After severing its relationship with the Kennedy Center in December, the Washington National Opera announced that it would move its two March operas to George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium—which is actually where the opera debuted its first production 15 years before the Kennedy Center opened in 1971.

“To me, it’s a huge deal that the opera is coming to Lisner,” Robert Baker, associate professor of music and director of performance studies at GWU, said in the university’s announcement. “This isn’t just a retreat from the Kennedy Center. There are things that are good about the space of Lisner, about its history and the intersection of our two communities—GW and Washington National Opera—that can create added value.”

Students will have opportunities to learn from the WNO on campus, including sitting in on an upcoming tech rehearsal this week.

Georgetown also hosted the American College Dance Association’s national festival for “very nominal fees” in May 2025, Harbert said, after the group pulled out of performing at the Kennedy Center.

Both Harbert and Abraham noted that their institutions have connections to a wealth of cultural and performing arts venues outside of the Kennedy Center.

“The presence of the Kennedy Center helped build the Washington arts scene into one of the major artistic cities in the United States. The theater community here alone is certainly one of the top handful of theater communities across the country. The dance community is stellar and impressive and very progressive. And the music community has always been incredibly robust,” Abraham said. “And while the Kennedy Center has been a great hub for many of those activities, the D.C. scene has become comparable to the top artistic communities in the country.”