2025 WAA Service Award Recipients!
Congratulations to our three (3) 2025 WAA Service Awardees, whose commitment(s) to serving their hometown of Los Angeles with compassion, creativity, and urgency in times of crisis and need was nothing short of inspiring.
Armory Center for the Arts
Debbie Allen Dance Academy
The Getty
The scale and urgency of the response to the Eaton Fire and the wider wildfire crisis revealed the extraordinary leadership, compassion, and resourcefulness of the Los Angeles community. So many groups and organizations rose to meet the moment that the selection committee felt it was essential to recognize not just one, but three outstanding efforts through the 2025 WAA Service Award.
We will be celebrating these incredible colleagues, as well as others, which will be announced in the coming weeks, at the 2025 Annual Luncheon & WAA Awards Ceremony on September 4 in Los Angeles as part of WAA^LA 2025. Join the celebration — add the luncheon when you register, or reach out to add luncheon tickets to your existing conference registration through August 15.
2025 SERVICE AWARD
Armory Center for the Arts
Armory’s Creativity and Community Care Room; credit: Milly Correa Hernandez
Founded in 1989, Armory Center for the Arts is a nonprofit visual arts organization based in Pasadena, California. The Armory presents exhibitions by forward-thinking contemporary artists and offers artist-led education programs for children, teens, and adults.
Guided by a mission to nurture the community and its young people through creating, learning, and presenting art to advance equity and social justice, the Armory envisions joyful, healthy, and equitable communities shaped by imagination, creativity, and diverse voices.
In response to the devastating Eaton Fire, the Armory launched a series of impactful relief initiatives:
Created the Armory Fire Relief Fund to support staff and teaching artists who lost their homes
Opened the Creativity & Community Care Room, a free drop-in space offering art-making, tea, snacks, and therapeutic activities along with workshops, meditations, and community meetings
Hosted grant-writing workshops, a regional town hall, and a Conservation Clinic where 30 conservators assisted residents in preserving fire-damaged belongings
Offered free ceramics, painting, photography, and letterpress printing classes for those displaced by the fire
Welcomed hundreds of displaced students through field trips and art-making sessions, and supported Pasadena Unified School District’s No Boundaries student art exhibition following the loss of hundreds of artworks
Featured community participation in its spring exhibition, Going Up the Hill, while teaching artists organized pop-up events and provided free art supplies to affected artists
Through these efforts, the Armory demonstrated its deep commitment to healing, creativity, and community care in a time of crisis.
Debbie Allen Dance Academy
DADA, ‘RISE’: credit courtesy of DADA
For Dancing in the Light: Healing Through the Arts – an initiative that offers free dance classes, performances, and studio spaces for Los Angeles residents and artists impacted by the LA wildfires.
Getty Museum
Altadena after the 2025 Eaton Fire; credit: Will Keightley
Within days of the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles County, the Getty Museum led a coalition of local arts organizations along with national and international supporters to launch the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. The fund was created to provide rapid, one-time emergency support of up to $10,000 to artists and arts workers who had lost homes or studios—helping to stabilize LA’s vibrant and diverse arts ecosystem.
The call for support resonated around the world. Major institutions—including the Getty, Mellon, Frankenthaler, Warhol, and Ford Foundations, as well as Qatar Museums—joined hundreds of galleries, corporations, philanthropists, and individuals from 28 countries in contributing to the fund.
To ensure equitable distribution, Getty selected the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) to administer the program. CCI opened applications less than two weeks after the fires began, engaged in extensive community outreach, and provided one-on-one technical assistance to ensure accessibility for all eligible applicants.
In total, the fund delivered over $16 million in immediate relief to approximately 1,700 cultural workers.
The WAA Awards Ceremony & Luncheon
Since 1985, the annual WAA Awards have celebrated and recognized colleagues and organizations who have advanced the performing arts field and strengthened the WAA community — those who enrich, inspire, and energize our work and our industry. See past award recipients here.
Be sure to grab your ticket for the Annual Luncheon when you register for the conference and celebrate your community of leaders who enrich, inspire, and energize our work and our industry.
You can add the Awards Luncheon to an existing registration by following the below steps:
Log into the WAA Member Portal
You can either go through the registration system again or click on Events > My Event Registrations and selecting Modify.
Then click on 'Select Ticket Options' (shown in image below) on the pass in your name cart and select your add-ons!
If you have any questions please reach out to membership@westarts.org.