Windmill Arts was born out of a need. That need was to provide professional performance space for developing artists. I realized years ago that the only people who really make money in the arts are the facility owners. Access to those facilities is financially prohibitive to many artists and certainly to the ones just starting out. The large regional theaters and even many professional theaters which have the space are typically not incentivized to cater to these newer artists. These theaters spend most of their energy maintaining their subscription base and funding new work and new artists requires significant investment and time; two things in short supply throughout the arts.

Like most artists I have been told “no” more times than I can count. The frustrating thing is that I wasn’t denied access typically because of my talent but because of my lack of finances.

I started acting at age five and doing real work around age ten. I was fortunate to be accepted to and attend a performance arts high school where I studied theater, dance, voice, and percussion. At 17, I was accepted by a top acting school that I could not afford to attend and ended up taking a small scholarship at a state school. After a year I realized that the small state school was not going to properly prepare me for an acting career and so I left the program and started studying accounting. I thought that with a “real job” I could eventually make enough money to go back to acting. I ended up getting an MPA and CPA and joined a large accounting firm in Atlanta, which was my initial connection to the city.

I always knew I would return to acting. I saved well and finally opened Down Right Theater in Duluth, GA and ran that for five years. In the fifth year, I was offered an opportunity to get my Masters in Fine Arts at Trinity Rep in Providence, RI, under the artistic direction of Oskar Eustis. I didn’t want to pass this up and had to decide between Down Right and my MFA. As a result, Down Right was sold to the founders of the Aurora Theater, which is now in Lawrenceville.

An expensive divorce in the middle of grad school found me once again without the means to pursue my dreams. So, I went back to work in accounting and saved enough to move to Los Angeles, where I started working here and there in film and TV. However, the experience was not rewarding, and I started choosing theater jobs on the East Coast over TV and film work. My agents found this odd and dropped me and so I went back to accounting once again. While I was working for a company in Los Angeles, I went on a business trip to Dublin, Ireland and decided to treat myself to an evening of theater. It was the performance of a play I saw at the Abbey in Dublin that convinced me to rededicate myself to theater completely. 

Still in Los Angeles, I co-founded Vanguard Repertory Company in Los Angeles. Vanguard was a physical-based theater company that only developed brand new work; it was the experience in Dublin, the new work we were developing at Vanguard and my general dislike of Los Angeles and the industry that helped me make my decision to move back to Atlanta. I knew Atlanta and me and my wife’s family were here. 

Once back, I saw that in Atlanta, like most major cities, space for theater is scarce and space for artistic development is very scarce.  So rather than look for a space, I sunk everything I had into building one. The original idea behind Windmill Arts was to provide a home for Vanguard Repertory Company and continue to develop our new work. However, I was now a facility owner: I had a building and space and had to acknowledge to either be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. The objective of Windmill Arts began to morph into not only being about our work but also about the work of any artist with new ideas and new visions. Now the mission of Windmill Arts is to advance new work by being an incubator for artists.

Sam R Ross, Owner & Executive Director