NEH Funding Cuts Lead to Canceled Grants for Bay Area Artists

On Friday afternoon, April 4, recipients of California Humanities grants received an email announcing the sudden cancellation of their funding from the statewide nonprofit.

“We are currently unable to issue any outstanding grant payments,” the email read. “All grants to state humanities and jurisdictions, including California Humanities have been suspended.”

California Humanities receives over 90% of its funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which on April 3 canceled millions of dollars in previously awarded federal grants to arts and cultural groups across the country.

“I hadn’t heard of the NEH, frankly, until last week,” said Matty Lynn Barnes, executive producer of the 30-minute documentary short Living Harriet Tubman, which received a $30,000 California Documentary Project grant from Californa Humanities in 2024. “We had zero clue where Cal Humanities money comes from.”

Colin Mandlin, managing director of Oakland Theater Project, said he was similarly unaware his organization’s $25,000 grant could be in jeopardy from federal funding cuts. This was the theater’s first grant from California Humanities, which was to go towards environmental justice-focused civic debates, an exhibition, a school workshop series and a walking tour of West Oakland to accompany their 2026 season.

“If no other funding comes through, then definitely we’ll have to cut some of these activities,” Mandlin said. Like the Living Harriet Tubman team, Oakland Theater Project had only received an initial payment of half the grant.

Maya Chupkov, a recipient of a 2023 California Documentary Project grant for a feature-length documentary based on stories from the podcast Proud Stutter, had just received her second check from California Humanities when the email came about her canceled award. California Humanities grants are disbursed in 50%, 40% and 10% chunks over the course of supported projects.

“I feel grateful that I was able to get the second installment,” she said, “but we’re gonna have to figure out how to fill that hole.” Without the final $3,500 of her grant, she said, she’ll need to reassess a major shoot and do more fundraising.

“The independent film world is just really tough right now,” she said.

Barnes and Living Harriet Tubman director Brandon Tauszik immediately launched a GoFundMe for the remaining $15,000 they expected to receive for the film, which tells the story of Nancy Whittle, a Fresno resident who spent 30 years portraying the abolitionist leader at Civil War reenactments across the state.

The goal of the film is to “reveal the power of facing painful histories.” (The National Park Service only recently restored a web page about the Underground Railroad that had been changed in February to remove a large image of Tubman and quotations from her.)

“This is a devastating loss to our otherwise self-funded project,” the filmmakers wrote on the fundraising site. “The Trump administration’s cuts to humanities and DEI funding aren’t just budgetary — they’re ideological attempts to erase cultural memory and reshape history.”

California Humanities was established in 1975 as a nonpartisan affiliate of the NEH, and has awarded over $44 million in grants during its 50 years. In addition to the California Documentary Project, the organization currently funds the programs Humanities for All, the Library Innovation Lab, Literature & Medicine, and Emerging Journalist Fellowships.

In other words, as they wrote in an April 4 press release, “We give resources to the organizations and individuals who bring you family library programs, documentary films that uncover little-known CA histories, hospital staff who focus on their patients as people, not pathologies, and stories generated by local journalists, not AI.”

California Humanities staff could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. But in the April 4 press release, the organization said it had joined with 56 other state and jurisdictional councils “to strategize how to work together to ensure no humanities council will shut its doors.”

Whether any of their grantees will receive the rest of their awards is up in the air. Mandlin notes it’s a difficult time for governmental funding at all levels. “Last year our state of California general operating grant was shrunk, our city of Oakland general operating grant was shrunk,” he said.

“It’s another degree of challenge with money that’s already been promised,” Mandlin said. “It can really lead leaders to think about retracting, playing it safe and cutting back in a way that doesn’t serve anyone.”

Shannon Faulise contributed reporting to this story.