Irish Arts Center Raises $40M for 51st Street Building Redevelopment

Irish Arts Center has raised more than $40 million to redevelop its 51st Street building, and revealed its state-of-the-art design. The new facility will complement the organization's $60 million 11th Avenue building opened in 2021, with construction expected to begin in early 2027 and conclude in 2029, completing Phase Two of the new Irish Arts Center capital project. The 51st Street building is the culmination of IAC's $100 million transformation, under the leadership of Executive Director Aidan Connolly and the IAC team, from a modest but significant Off-Off-Broadway theater into one of New York's premiere multidisciplinary presenters in a state-of-the-art two-building campus.

Today, the organization also revealed long-planned succession news, with Connolly's announcement that he will conclude his twenty-year tenure as Executive Director in July 2027.  Connolly was appointed in 2007 with the mandate to reimagine a new Irish Arts Center for the 21st century and bring that vision to fruition. He will remain as an advisor to the board for strategic, financial, and capital planning and to help transition and onboard new leadership, through the completion of the 51st Street construction in 2029.

The New 51st Street Building

The new Irish Arts Center is the result of an enduring collaboration between the people of Ireland and New York, signifying a new era in the cultural life of the global Irish diaspora. Reflecting Ireland's position as a diverse, modern European country, and building on its legacy as a land of poets, it provides a new vital home for development and presentation of the arts in the world's cultural capital.

Designed by Davis Brody Bond/Stantec, the new 9,499 square-foot 51st Street building rounds out this vision: it will be constructed as an expansion of the organization's 21,700 square-foot 11th Avenue home, with both buildings connected by the Center's ground floor lobby and Devlin Cafe as a vital junction and hub. The 51st Street building, to be accessed through the existing 11th Avenue building via a new courtyard entrance on 51st Street, will include a 75-seat flexible venue in the exact location of the organization's legacy theater. This new venue will echo the warmth and intimacy of the original with the innovation and adaptability that audiences have come to expect from IAC's JL Greene Theatre.

The new multidisciplinary space will expand IAC's potential for programming that complements and runs simultaneously with offerings in the 11th Avenue building, including live music, film, literature, conversation, visual arts, festival programming, and community events. With a smaller capacity, efficient operations, and the flexibility to be transformed from intimate seated venue to rehearsal studio and special event configurations, the new 51st Street is intended to serve the needs of early career and local artists, community groups, and festival programming. (The 11th Avenue facility will continue its dynamic, eclectic program of medium-scale programming across the fields of theater, dance, live music, visual arts and film, interdisciplinary work, and community programming and education in its JL Greene Theatre, Studio, and Library spaces.)

With direct connections to the rear of the 11th Avenue facility at three levels, the new 51st Street building will also include safe, sustainable, accessible workspace for the entire IAC team and visiting collaborators; and, with a fully excavated basement, additional storage and utility spaces for the administrative, operational, production, and physical plant needs of both buildings. The project also includes the replacement of an egress route to 52nd Street through the basement of 51st Street, fulfilling a request by the New York City government, clearing a path for the development of more affordable housing to the north of the IAC campus.

Materializing an ongoing plan, the 51st Street redevelopment project reassembled the crucial funding stakeholders from the project's first phase on 11th Avenue, including the City of New York, the Irish government, the State of New York, and private funders. Cohering the vision, much of the design and project team behind that phase likewise return, including architects Davis Brody Bond/Stantec, theater design consultants Fisher Dachs Associates, construction management STO Building Group, and project manager/owner's representative Susan Wallace of Sterling Project Development. As with Phase One, it has been shepherded internally by Aidan Connolly in collaboration with the IAC board and staff.

Having crossed the threshold of $40 million raised for the 51st Street building, IAC is continuing its Phase Two campaign, Always Home, the successor to its Phase One campaign, Almost Home, to raise an additional $10 million for the organization's endowment and programming and operating reserves.

Aidan Connolly's Tenure of Transformation

IAC's transformation is a story of vision, strategy, planning, collaboration, and navigation through an era of enormous opportunity and historic challenges. From the financial crisis in 2008-2010, through the global pandemic that arrived midway through the construction of the first phase of the new IAC in 2020, the organization, and the ambitious project of reimagining it, have survived and indeed thrived through the one of the most tumultuous periods for arts institutions in recent history.

This success against the tide was underpinned by the new strategic vision Connolly established for Irish Arts Center at the outset of his appointment as IAC's leader in 2007. Pillar by pillar and discipline by discipline, IAC became a multidisciplinary presenting institution and an essential cultural bridge from the island of Ireland to New York. It befits both the vast, inclusive, cutting-edge contemporary artistic breadth of these places, as well as the legacies and traditions that remain vital to this day.

Through the diligent capacity-building process that yielded the new Irish Arts Center, IAC's team under Connolly's leadership developed enduring partnerships with like-minded colleague institutions of New York City and Ireland. Across the years, they included BAM, St. Ann's Warehouse, 92NY, Symphony Space, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and La MaMa E.T.C. in New York, and The Lyric Theatre, The Abbey Theatre, Project Arts Centre, Luail – Ireland's National Dance Company, Fishamble, and Druid, among many others, in Ireland.

IAC's widening vision—now given form with the new Irish Arts Center—was propelled at every step by the eclectic ecosystem Connolly envisioned, fueled by stakeholders for each discipline, centered around artists and including audiences, supporters, institutional allies, media and opinion leaders, government partners, board, and staff. Throughout this evolution, the spirit of Irish hospitality embodied by the organization has forged a deep bond between the institution and its dynamic universe of stakeholders. This has yielded dramatic programmatic and financial growth.

Throughout both phases of the capital project, Connolly, who began his career in the arts followed by a decade working in government and politics, shepherded and sustained transformative investments from the City of New York ($56.5 million), the State of New York, ($13 million), and the Irish government ($18.4 million), across multiple government successions, including four Mayors, five City Council Speakers, and five Irish Prime Ministers, each united by the Center's vision under Connolly's leadership to build a permanent cultural bridge, united by shared values, between the island of Ireland and New York. 

Across Connolly's tenure, Irish Arts Center has increased its earned and contributed revenues from $690,000 in 2007 to more than $8 million today — an average annual rate of growth of 14%, nearly five times the growth of the US economy during this period — and secured more than $100 million in funding to develop and execute both phases of the new Irish Arts Center, with no ongoing debt.  In that same period, its annual Spirit of Ireland Gala, spearheaded by Connolly and longtime IAC Vice Chair Pauline Turley, featuring honorary chairs Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne and honorees including such luminaries as Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert, and Elvis Costello, has grown from under $300,000 in 2007 to more than $3.7 million in 2025.  Similarly, the staff has grown from four full-time employees in 2007 to 30+ full-time staff and more than 200 part-time and contract workers annually.

Upon completion and opening of the Phase One building, and upon weathering the COVID crisis, Connolly and IAC's board began development of the leadership succession plan announced today. Their shared goal was to ensure the energy and rigor of Connolly's leadership through the hiring of his successor—followed by a two-year period of transition where Connolly will have time for other projects while providing continuity for the organization and the capital project.

After concluding his tenure as Executive Director next summer, as he maintains his advisory role, Connolly will also serve as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Galway, documenting the learnings of IAC's journey of cultural entrepreneurship, and building on his academic work and thought leadership in the field of nonprofit strategic, financial, and capital planning. Connolly currently serves on the faculty of The New School in New York City where he teaches a course on nonprofit management, governance and strategy. He completed his M.B.A. in Strategic Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, where he was a four-time recipient of the John M. Bendheim Award from the Wharton Social Impact Initiative.