AT&T PERFORMING ARTS CENTER ANNOUNCES THE 2026/2027 SEASON OF ELEVATOR PROJECT

The nonprofit AT&T Performing Arts Center is pleased to announce the 2026/2027 season of Elevator Project, featuring eight productions, including five first-time participants and three returning companies. This 12th season includes a mix of artistic styles and genres, including dance, theater and music.

“Serving on the Elevator Project panel felt less like evaluation and more like discovery – encountering daring, deeply felt work unfolding across Dallas that I genuinely wanted to see brought to life. What struck me most was the depth and range of artistry in this city – voices shaped by different communities, disciplines, and lived experiences, all converging to create something vibrant and necessary,” said Sean Smith, artist and member of the 2026/2027 Elevator Project Advisory Review Panel. “The process didn’t just highlight talent; it fostered a sense of endless possibility and a willingness to go beyond the norm. As both an artist and a panelist, I felt personally invested in the work being put forward. Elevator Project became, to me, a meaningful platform – one that nurtures ideas ready not only for the Arts District, but for a much wider audience.”

Since 2014, this singular initiative has featured the work of small, emerging and historically marginalized arts groups performing on the Center’s stages. The selected participants receive a myriad of support including venue access, production assistance, marketing, and other resources to help bring their artistic visions to life.

The 2026/2027 season of Elevator Project will be staged in several venues across the Center’s campus. Ticket prices are $29.50 for all shows, with reduced-priced parking for Elevator Project patrons when buying tickets online. Elevator Project is presented by The Eugene McDermott Foundation with generous support from the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, the Texas Commission on the Arts and The Theodore and Beulah Beasley Foundation.

2026/2027 SEASON of ELEVATOR PROJECT

Selection Process:

Elevator Project participants are chosen through a two-tier, peer-review process. The first tier is the five-member Advisory Review Panel. Their selections are then reviewed by the Executive Review Committee.

Advisory Review Panel:

• Grace Cook – Arts advocate and strategist, nonprofit cultural leader and champion of emerging organizations
• Gabriela Leodiou – Stage and production manager, theatre producer and artist-centered collaborator
• Marion Marshall – “Creative Disruptor”, community-based artist and visual design creative
• Sean J. Smith – Freelance Artist: dancer, choreographer and educator
• Sara Weeks – Actor, designer, director, theatre educator and creative community supporter

Executive Review Committee:

• Martine Elyse Philippe – City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture, Director
• David Small – City of Dallas Arts and Culture Advisory Commission, Chair
• Warren Tranquada – AT&T Performing Arts Center, President & CEO

Selected artists and organizations:

Cole Vernon

Eleven 11 Productions

EMERGE Coalition, Inc.

Marena Riyad

Pegasus Media Project

Prism Movement Theater

Second Chance Players

The HighArt Foundation

*Dates and venues for the 2026/2027 season of Elevator Project will be announced at a later date.

Cole Vernon

Emerging SOuLOS: Celestia

Emerging SOuLOS: Celestia is a dance performance that unites professional and pre-professional artists through new, original works.

Envisioned as a recurring platform in the Dallas dance scene, this edition features eight solos inspired by the eight planets, created and performed by professional Dallas dance artists on a 4X4 platform; the pre-professional collection of dancers in ROOTS will perform transitional ensemble works between each solo.

Celebrating the diversity, imagination, and collective strength of Dallas’ dance community.

Eleven 11 Productions

Panic! At the Sketch Show

The creators of Most Likely Forever Yours present a new comedy experience about the thing that keeps us up at night: fear.

Panic! At the Sketch Show is a high-energy mix of character-driven sketches exploring everything from social anxiety to existential dread.

EMERGE Coalition, Inc.

Echoes From a Memory

Echoes From a Memory is a 62-minute multimedia work composed for The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Through live chamber music, archival film, and voice, we explore the lives of John and Jacqueline Kennedy as they balance their public vision of courage and creativity with their private moments of love and loss.

Rooted in Dallas yet resonating nationwide, the work reimagines the Kennedys’ legacy as an enduring American Camelot that still echoes through time.

Marena Riyad

MAJENIN – A Palestinian Love Story

MAJENIN – A Palestinian Love Story – ‘Majenin’ means ‘crazy people’ in Arabic. A tale of two fools who dare to love in a world obsessed with their sadness. This is the Palestinian rom-com you’ve been waiting for — finally, a welcome occupation!

Pegasus Media Project

King of Hearts Reimagined

King of Hearts Reimagined is an immersive, meta-theatrical reimagining of the iconic Persian film Soltane Ghalbha. The audience witnesses both the love story on screen and the personal lives of the actors who are performing it, moving between cinematic fiction and lived memory. This story-within-a-story explores longing, separation, and the search for home across generations. It invites the Persian community and the wider public to gather, remember, and feel together.

Prism Movement Theater

Scrap Heart

Scrap Heart is a groundbreaking, wordless movement-theater production created by deaf artists that uses technology, ASL, and embodied storytelling to center deaf and disabled audiences in a fully accessible theatrical experience.

The production will be accompanied by ASL classes, talkbacks, and community gatherings to foster cultural exchange and shared storytelling among deaf and hearing audiences.

Second Chance Players

Bare: A Pop Opera

Bare: A Pop Opera is a contemporary, sung-through musical that examines adolescence, identity, faith, mental health and self-acceptance through the story of students at a Catholic boarding school. Since its world premiere in Los Angeles in 2000, the work has become a nationally and internationally produced cult classic, particularly recognized for its honesty, artistic ambition, and relevance to LGBTQ+ audiences and allied communities.

The HighArt Foundation

Homage to the Journey

Homage to the Journey is a multidisciplinary performing arts experience featuring soprano NaGuanda Nobles, accompanied by Dr. Terrance L. Lane.

Homage to the Journey will take audiences on an extraordinary exploration of the spiritual music genre, its themes of faith, hope, liberation, and its profound importance to the African American experience in our country. Homage to the Journey will be moving, thought-provoking, entertaining, educational, and inspiring.

For more information on Elevator Project please visit us here. Downloadable photos of past seasons are available here.