The Performing Arts Legacy Project is an online platform to document and share performers’ careers created by the Research Center for Arts and Culture (RCAC) at Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund). It is a resource to promote positive aging, intergenerational collaboration, and to provide researchers and cultural institutions with an archive of creative careers, as curated by performing artists themselves.
The site has been piloted with small cohorts of performers aged 62+ at the Fund and several small theaters around New York City. Trainers, students and volunteers work in this intergenerational project to create career timelines, oral histories, and video and audio life reviews, capturing memorabilia and experiences to preserve our national creative legacy.
While The Performing Arts Legacy Project is a tool targeted to older professional performing artists, it can also be used for performers and artists all along the spectrum of their careers, to document their work as it evolves. The site will include guides in documentation of personal data, multimedia storytelling, managing copyright/permissions, and more.
As the site grows to include more performers, it will present a chorus of voices representing many different types of careers in the performing arts. Through indexing and search tools it will serve aspiring performers and researchers with access to previously untold narratives about the lives of artists, rich with many previously unseen photographs, documents, and audio/visual recordings, interconnected and in conversation with one another, much like the lives of so many artists.
Learn more and explore the sites that performing arts professionals have created at performingartslegacy.org.
Learn more about the project in this 3-minute video:
Excerpts from the first cohort of actors
Curated Life Reviews
Oral Histories
Learn more / contact us
If you have questions about the project, or would like to learn more about how to get involved, please take a moment to send us an inquiry: