Dance/NYC Launches Dance Workforce Resilience Fund
The DWR Fund will provide direct financial support to freelance dancers by supplementing their contracted wages.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Jun. 18, 2025
Dance/NYC is launching Dance Workforce Resilience Fund, a new regranting pilot initiative designed to promote fair labor practices and address wage inequities within New York City's dance sector. The DWR Fund will provide direct financial support to freelance dancers by supplementing their contracted wages.
In its pilot iteration, the DWR Fund will distribute $324,000 over the course of the grant period, awarding one-time flat grants of $1,000 to more than 320 freelance dancers in the New York metropolitan area for their contracted dance work completed between January 1, 2025 and April 30, 2026. The application portal will open on June 18, 2025, and remain available through March 3, 2026. Recipients will be selected monthly through a weighted lottery process designed to prioritize underpaid and underprotected dance workers, including African, Latina/o/x, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA), disabled, immigrant, elder, women-identifying, gender nonconforming/nonbinary/genderqueer, and transgender dancers.
Eligibility and application guidelines are available on Dance.NYC/DWRFund.
"Inspired by guaranteed income programs and peer-led wage subsidy efforts, the DWR Fund pilot is an important intervention to confront the economic disparities that have long defined the dance industry," says Sara Roer, Interim Executive Director of Dance/NYC. "By linking support to contracts, we are not only putting money in dancers' hands, we're helping shift the culture of labor in dance and incentivize practices that safeguard workers from financial and physical precarity."
According to Dance/NYC's research report State of NYC Dance 2023: Findings from the Dance Industry Census, dance remains financially unsustainable for most workers, with freelance dancers earning an average of $22 per hour-15% below NYC's living wage standard. The report further revealed that dancers earn significantly less than their counterparts in administrative or leadership roles and that 44% of dancers take jobs without formal contracts, exacerbating economic instability.
The DWR Fund is a core component of Dance/NYC's multiyear Dance. Workforce. Resilience. (DWR) Initiative, which aims to strengthen the dance ecology by fostering economic sustainability for individual dance workers and organizations alike.
Dance/NYC will oversee the administration of the Fund in collaboration with consultants F. Javier Torres-Campos and Jo-Ná A. Williams, Esq., utilizing feedback from the DWR Fund Advisory Group composed of individual artists with grantmaking experience and knowledge of arts labor advocacy who represent the demographic makeup of the local population. Monthly grantee announcements will take place between August 2025 and April 2026.
To assist applicants, Dance/NYC will host a virtual information session on June 25, 2025, and offer one-on-one technical assistance sessions throughout the application period. Spanish and Chinese translation, ASL interpretation, and live captioning will be available upon request to ensure accessibility.
Additional information about eligibility, application requirements, accessibility, and application support can be found on Dance.NYC/DWRFund
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