Gray Area / Grand Theater

Gray Area is a San Francisco-based nonprofit cultural incubator.

Our mission is to cultivate, sustain, and apply antidisciplinary collaboration — integrating art, technology, science, and the humanities — towards a more equitable and regenerative future. Since our inception in 2008, Gray Area has established itself as a singular hub for critically engaging with technology and culture in the Bay Area, while also reaching a global audience. Through our platform of public events, education, and research programs we empower a diverse community of creative practitioners with the agency to create meaningful social impact through category-defying work.

We use digital tools to create art and design projects that benefit society. We test and scale projects with high impact potential, teach digital tools to support artists and technologists, and inspire our community by promoting meaningful new work.

We apply the promise and inspiration of digital art to a broader social context. Our programs are transforming cities into creative outlets, applying technology to solve problems, and shaping how art is created and consumed in the digital era.

Creative Action for Good Gray Area is San Francisco's premier cultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation – applying antidisciplinary practice towards some of the most complex challenges facing our world.

For over a decade we’ve generated platforms that enable creators of diverse backgrounds and perspectives who defy categorization to transcend boundaries within deep artistic collaboration.

Through public events, education, and incubation, we engage art directly with the critical issues facing our rapidly unfolding reality.

Cultivating Community

Our mission prioritizes cultivating, sustaining, and amplifying a diverse creative community. We elevate underrepresented voices through thoughtful curation of performers, speakers, and artists. Over 50% of artists in our most impactful programs amplify historically underrepresented communities.

Cultural Regeneration Model

Gray Area has developed an engagement model creating a positive feedback loop from audience inspiration to community leadership. Our public events programming draws audiences into our year round education offerings, and then their projects can enter our incubator to refine and scale. After completing our programs, artists often return to teach and perform, inspiring an audience anew.

Public Programs

Gray Area hosts and produces over 100 public events per year. Our events programming seeks to inspire, educate, and facilitate antidisciplinary engagement around important and challenging topics such as technology and society, the environment, and social justice.

We demonstrate the value of art as a necessary tool for thinking critically. We produce museum-quality exhibitions with cutting edge media technologies. Our exhibitions showcase international artists who are engaging with technology’s impact on culture, as well as local emerging artists with work created in our Cultural Incubator and Education programs.

We present avant-garde, experimental works at the cutting edge of experiential technology, surround cinema, dance, projection mapping, and music. We create audio/visual collaborations, premiere new works, and elevate local artists on bills with world-class headlining acts.

We convene practitioners in the arts, science, technology, and humanities to share knowledge, forge connections, and generate holistic insights that lead to a better understanding of the complex challenges facing humanity.