Columbia, Tennessee
Annie Moses Institute
for Music & Culture
Restoring the historic Polk Theatre as the future home of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
Scroll
The Annie Moses Institute is raising up the next generation of musicians, storytellers, and performing artists to populate the screens and stages of the world with Godly excellence. Our programs are built on a foundation of faith, prayer, and four generations of musicianship that have carried us from a Texas cotton patch to Juilliard, Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry, PBS, and four Billboard Top-10 Classical Crossover albums.
Today we operate two flagship programs in downtown Columbia, Tennessee:
Students in pre-college and collegiate programs spanning classical performance, stagecraft, drama, songwriting, arranging, and the philosophy of art.
Attendees last year across three to four full Broadway-scale musicals — 16 performances each, regularly selling out our 126-seat house.
We are leasing inadequate space at $120,000 a year — money that builds no equity. Our students rehearse in makeshift rooms; our audiences sit elbow to elbow. We have outgrown our current facility, and now, for the first time, we have the chance to build a permanent home.
On the corner of Garden and West 8th Street in downtown Columbia sits the Polk Theatre, a landmark that once anchored the town's cultural life. Built in an era when every American town had a theater at its heart, the Polk has sat dormant for decades, used as a storage facility, its marquee dark.
The Polk's hand-painted murals and ornate proscenium frieze are still there — preserved beneath decades of dormancy. We aren't building from scratch. We're restoring something irreplaceable: a 20th-century landmark whose original architectural artistry will anchor a 21st-century campus for music, education, and performance.
We are approaching this as a phased, decade-long campus project — disciplined, prudent, and built to last. Funded through a combination of private philanthropy, federal and state historic tax credits, New Markets Tax Credits, preservation grants, specialty nonprofit lending, and our own earned revenue growth.
The Polk Theatre acquisition is a once-in-a-generation chance: the first permanent home for the Annie Moses Institute, and the restoration of one of downtown Columbia's most important architectural landmarks.
A restored Polk campus is projected to deliver:
For more than a decade, the Annie Moses Institute has trained young artists to fill stages and screens with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Today we have an extraordinary opportunity: to restore the historic Polk Theatre as a permanent home for that mission — and to anchor downtown Columbia with a cultural institution built to last for generations.
We cannot do this alone. Every gift — from foundational capital to monthly support — carries us closer to raising the marquee, restoring the stage, and opening the doors to the next generation of students, audiences, and artists.