"At Brown, we see the arts as a catalyst for creativity, discovery and innovation. This new Performing Arts Center will attract the best faculty, visiting artists and students to Brown and provide them with the necessary diversity of spaces to experiment, work and perform."
— Brown University President Christina H. Paxson
The Vision
Brown University is committed to the full integration of the arts into a complete liberal arts education. We know that addressing some of the world’s most vexing challenges benefits from the creative problem-solving enabled by people who have studied and experienced the arts.
This means increasing access to the arts among students from all academic disciplines — from the humanities, to international affairs, to the sciences — and creating new opportunities for teaching, research, artmaking, performance and experimentation. This means attracting thought leadership from scholars and cultural institutions well beyond Brown.
A new, state-of-the-art Performing Arts Center is essential in Brown’s ability to achieve those goals.
Brown unveiled plans to build the PAC in 2017, selected acclaimed architecture firm REX as its design partner months later, and offered the first glimpse at renderings for the building in February 2019. In May 2022, the University named the building the Lindemann Performing Arts Center in recognition of a generous gift from Frayda B. Lindemann alongside her late husband, George Lindemann Sr.
The new building on College Hill in Providence will not only be one-of-a-kind in higher education, but will also push the boundaries of innovation in performance spaces across the nation and the globe. With a radical approach to spatial, acoustic and technical flexibility, the PAC will inspire innovative art-making, enable new forms of artistic collaboration and serve as a hub for performance at Brown.
The University’s target completion date for the building is 2023.