For five days last June, the Las Vegas-based Nevada Women’s Film Festival displayed flashes of what founder Nikki Corda believes is its potential to become “the premier women’s film festival in the country.”
Thanks largely to ample funding Corda leveraged through a combination of grants and private donations, the 2024 festival celebrated its 10th anniversary by screening more than 100 films “by and about women” for the second consecutive year. Supplemental programming like the Young Filmmakers’ Workshop also thrived in what she calls “the most comfortable year for us, ever.”
Naturally, Corda thought that 2025 would mark another major step forward in the festival’s growth. But her outlook changed in early April, when Nevada Humanities, a main source of funding for the festival, received a letter stating that its five-year general operating support grant funding had been terminated.
It was part of a coordinated move by the Trump administration, in apparent conjunction with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to cut grants that had for decades been distributed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to regional affiliates like Nevada Humanities. In a news release, the NEH stated that the reason for the cuts was to “ensure that all future awards will ... not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and ... help instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” According to reports, the canceled grants will be used to pay for Trump’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.”
Nevada Humanities drew roughly 75% of its $1.5 million annual budget from the NEH funds that have been terminated. Most of that funding helps support “innovative, humanities-based projects created primarily for Nevada audiences,” including the Nevada Women’s Film Festival. The nonprofit depends on Nevada Humanities for about the same percentage of its yearly operating costs. It has received more than $50,000 from the council since 2017, including a maximum allocation of $7,500 last year.
Now, they’re both scrambling to make what little they have left go a long way.
“The main cut for us was to our tech crew, who were willing to take a hugely reduced pay cut that they don’t deserve. We’ve also had to scale back our programming from over 100 films to about 47 and reduce the festival from five days to four. For us, that’s huge, and obviously not ideal,” Corda says.
Over the last three fiscal years, Nevada Humanities executive director Christina Barr has overseen the disbursement of $628,953 in NEH funding to major Las Vegas cultural institutions like the Discovery Children’s Museum, Las Vegas Natural History Museum, Nevada Ballet Theatre, the Neon Museum and the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, and specialized groups like the Henderson Writer’s Group, Poetry Promise and Writing Downtown Las Vegas.
Now, she’s been given no choice but to suspend its grantmaking program indefinitely.
“That federal support touches almost everything we do, so we’ve had to kind of triage our work a little bit and see what we can pare down in the budget,” Barr says. “We’ll have to figure out how to move ahead in a scrappy way, but our board has chosen to fight and keep rolling as best we can.”
That decision to tough it out gained some powerful backing on April 30, when the Mellon Foundation donated $15 million in emergency funds to the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Nevada Humanities is guaranteed to see $200,000 of that, with another $50,000 contingent on its ability to raise matching funds through private donations by December 31.
“This gift from the Mellon Foundation is going to help stabilize us in the short term so we’re able to sustain ourselves for a few months longer while we exhaust every effort we can to have our funding returned to us. I think of it as a bridge that’s going to help buy us some time as we let the various efforts that may be happening at the national level play out,” Barr says.
Another reason to remain hopeful arrived May 1, when the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association filed a joint lawsuit against DOGE and the NEH that contests those departments’ constitutional authority to impose those cuts without congressional approval.
Barr says Nevada Humanities has also appealed the NEH cuts, but adds that she’s skeptical it will be granted.
“We have requested due process from NEH regarding the sudden termination of our general operating support grant. NEH has informed state humanities councils that we will not be offered an appeal process at all. This is surprising, since it is my understanding that this process is required by law,” Barr says.
In the meantime, Corda, too, is doing her best to roll with the punches. The 11th annual Nevada Women’s Film Festival is still set for June 19-22, and the show must go on—with or without federal money.
“I’ve said before that we wouldn’t even have a film festival if it wasn’t for Nevada Humanities, especially in some of the early years, when the only revenue we had came from them,” Corda says. “They’ve been instrumental for us being able to produce this for the community, and because of them, we’ve been able to become one of the longest-running film festivals in the state. We’re not going to let this stop our dreams now.”
Barr laments that the cuts came just as Nevada Humanities “really came into our next plane of maturity,” but is committed to keeping the ship afloat.
“We actually budgeted for two new full-time employees this year. Obviously, we won’t be filling those positions anymore, but we’re very grateful for the Nevadans in every corner who have been generously donating their time and money to help us in this moment,” Barr says. “We’re going to do our best to keep this moving no matter what. With the support of the community, I think we can rebuild.”
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