It’s a spring morning in Newark – one of those days when it’s 43° in the morning rush hour but the forecast says the temperature will reach 70° so we have to navigate layers of sweaters and find the right socks. You know the vibes. I’m sitting with John Schreiber in his office at New Jersey Performing Arts Center. “When people generally think of NJPAC,” I say, “they may just think of performances. I know that’s incomplete. Can you just give an overview of what NJPAC is in 2026?”
He pauses… “NJPAC is the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey’s anchor cultural institution. And that means to us that we’re here, we will be here predictably, and we’re in service to community in ways that we know about and ways that we don’t know about. And the most fun of the job, for me, and I think for a lot of my colleagues, is hearing from community about how this arts center can add value to their lives.”
It’s the part—the ways they don’t know about—that got my attention. Because it reframes everything. Schreiber describes his days not through meetings or metrics, but through interruptions. Phone calls. Requests. Invitations into problems.
“So every day,” he continues, “I’ll get at least a call from somebody saying we’re interested in standing up a music program in the West Ward, or we’re interested in NJPAC coming to this particular school and doing a residency, or we believe that food insecurity is an issue that needs broader visibility. How can NJPAC create forums for conversations and action around issues.”
These are not programming decisions. They are signals.
And NJPAC, as he describes it, is less a curator of art than a host for what matters.
“So the job of NJPAC in Newark, and then to an extent around the state, is to be a venue, a space, where useful conversations can occur about the issues that are most important to the people we’re in service to. The diversity of the state of New Jersey, I think we’re the fourth most diverse state in the country, so we have an opportunity to speak to fifteen different ethnicities and nationalities, certainly through what we put on stage, but as importantly through the social impact work that we do across arts education, community engagement, and now arts and well-being. So it’s a wonderful canvas to paint on, especially in Newark, which is a remarkably collaborative city in my experience.”
The Math of Meaning
If you want to understand NJPAC, you have to understand its contradictions. It is a $70 million institution. It knowingly loses money—on purpose. NJPAC is a stage for legends, emerging artists, and community voices. When I ask how it balances and creates harmony between prestige and accessibility, John answers, “Thirty-five to forty percent of what we put on our stages, we know we’ll lose money,” Schreiber says.
This isn’t framed as sacrifice. It’s framed as responsibility.
“We spend eight million dollars a year on all the work that we do in social impact. The revenue return is very small on that. And then we present hundreds and hundreds of events a year, some of which are obviously commercial, and our expectation is if we do it right, we’ll sell the houses out, and we need to do that.
Jerry Seinfeld is coming, sold out two houses. Great. PAW Patrol, two shows, all the four year olds have a ball, and we sell the house out and make money. But we’re also doing a celebration of John Coltrane at one hundred. I know we won’t sell that out. But we should do it, and we do it.
So the hard part is making a balanced budget every year that is reflective of our commitment to diverse programming, not only in terms of the audiences that we’re looking to attract, but also the genres that we present. Jazz does not make a lot of money. World music sometimes does not make a lot of money.
But we have a commitment to diversity of genre representation, and then diversity of attraction, based on all the audiences that are available to us. And so we’re dependent on philanthropy, and we’re dependent on being smart enough to balance our bookings so that at the end of the day we come out even.”
I lean in on this point. “If a program is intended or expected not to be a moneymaker,” I ask, “where do you point to success in those shows?”
“If I do a jazz show in Prudential Hall, which has twenty-eight hundred seats, and I can sell twelve hundred seats to that jazz show, I might lose money on that evening. But if I have marketed in such a way so that some fraction of that audience who comes in has never heard a jazz artist before, we win.
Winning is not always about financial success. If we can advance cultural literacy through what we do, that’s a win for us. So there are a lot of different ways to win.
I remember when I was growing up in the business, my boss was George Wein, who produced the Kool Jazz Festivals, these big stadium R&B shows. And you’d have Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, The O’Jays, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, all on one stage. And George would always put the Count Basie Orchestra on first.
And I said to him, ‘George, these people haven’t come to see Count Basie. They came to see Aretha.’ And he said, ‘You know what, of those forty thousand people, if four hundred of them go to the record store the next day and look for a Basie record, we did it.’
So there’s no singular win as a presenter. There are lots of ways to win, and some of them we don’t even know about.”
Along with presenting art, there’s the nurturing of it. Through its arts education program, NJPAC is shaping people, young people and not as young people. I asked John why is that so important. He pauses.
Most of the children we’re in service to are from under-resourced backgrounds. Many of them are in challenged circumstances, sometimes raised by a single parent or a grandparent, or parents who have two jobs. Sometimes the school environment is not what it might be.
So by participating in the arts, whether it’s in our training programs or through school residencies, which we do a couple hundred of every year, it’s a way for us to open gateways for young people not only to learn skills, but also for social and emotional growth.
We now have a research unit tracking how a child’s life changes through participation in the arts, and what programs are most impactful in changing how a kid thinks about themselves.
And the other thing we did years ago was shift to a maker model, where kids are creators and producers of their own art. When you ask a kid to tell you about themselves through the arts, you’re asking them to be brave.
You’re teaching them a skill, but you’re also saying what you have to say is important, and we want to hear from you. And when they do that, their confidence grows.
We also have social workers present in our programs so that when a kid shares something that is triggering, we can support them and give them a sense of safety.
And we don’t care whether a kid becomes Wynton Marsalis or a dentist. A dentist with empathy would be a very good thing.”
We shift to the expansion. “NJPAC is expanding physically—housing, retail, public space. That’s a different kind of power. How do you think about that responsibility?”
Schreiber is quick to course correct the line of question. “I wouldn’t use the word power, because it’s a kind of antagonistic word, especially these days. The idea is to be useful and inclusive.
The fact that we were able to master plan this campus, I’m very grateful to Prudential for encouraging that. Rather than developing building by building, we were able to think comprehensively.
Most real estate developers are bottom-line oriented. That’s the nature of the business. But as a nonprofit developer, we’re not obliged to squeeze every dollar out of every inch of real estate.
So in addition to residential, retail, restaurants, and streetscape, we’re building a sixty-thousand-square-foot education and community center right in front of the arts center.
That enables us to prove to the community that education, well-being, and community are as important as buying a ticket. And integrating that in a seamless way will help remove misperceptions that a place like NJPAC is not for them. It is for all of us.
The campus that will come to life over the next year will be vibrant and will reflect the diversity of our community.”
Before we wrap, I ask him one more thing. “Hospitality feels different here. Caretaking feels like a priority. A high priority. Why is that?”
“Because everyone is welcome.
I say to our teammates, you are all owners. Feel free to act like an owner, because this is your place.
We have ushers who have been here twenty, twenty-five years. When they greet you, they’re welcoming you to their home.
And anything we do, there are a hundred hands in it. Any one piece, if it doesn’t work, could affect everything. So there’s a sense of responsibility and ownership of the work, and a real desire to share it.
That, to me, is what’s so moving, and so effective.”
And that’s the conversation.
