New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Receives Historic $60 Million Donation

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has received an unprecedented $60 million donation from an anonymous benefactor, according to The New York Times.

The contribution, which follows the library’s 60th anniversary in 2025, is the largest in the institution’s history. It will support a major expansion of work aimed at safeguarding the library’s holdings and making more of its approximately 15 million archival items available digitally.

The Library for the Performing Arts has already placed portions of its collection online, including photographs from the Martha Swope and White Studio archives. The new investment will allow that work to continue on a much larger scale while also supporting improvements to the systems used to catalog and search materials including photographs, manuscripts and rare recordings.

The New York Times also reported new details about how the donation came about. The benefactor, who lives outside New York, visited the collection in June and had a personal connection to the institution through her mother, who admired the performing arts library.

Even with the record-setting contribution, converting the entirety of such an extensive archive into digitally accessible material remains a larger undertaking. Pereira told the Times that the $60 million would take the institution “a big part of the way there.”

The library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive is not currently part of those plans. Pereira explained to the Times that expanding digital access to the performance recordings would entail a “very complex rights conversation.” The possibility of addressing those restrictions at some point in the future, however, has not been ruled out.

The funding will instead provide the library with substantial new resources to preserve other parts of its collection, bring additional materials online and make those holdings easier to discover and study from outside the library itself.

The library received a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre in 2025.