ASHTAR Theatre is restoring a century-old building in Birzeit - a 1921 stone house that used to be Birzeit University's physics laboratory - turning it into a Performing Arts Academy and permanent home for ASHTAR Theatre: training rooms, a performance hall, a recording studio, and a community cafeteria. The renovation is underway but not yet finished. Help us complete it and open our doors.
For 35 years, ASHTAR Theatre has trained young Palestinians and toured original work to more than 72 countries - without a permanent home, rent-dependent. In 2024, after a long search, ASHTAR was granted a historic building in Birzeit's Old City on a 25-year lease. Renovation has begun, but the spaces that will hold training, performance, and community life cannot open until the building is finished. Every unfinished room is a class that can't be taught and a performance that can't be staged.
ASHTAR is rehabilitating the building floor by floor, preserving its historic stone identity while fitting it out for performing arts. The plan creates training rooms and multi-purpose studios, a performance hall, a recording and control room, changing and rest areas, and a community cafeteria that opens the building to the people of Birzeit. Your donation completes and equips specific spaces, moving the building from construction site to working theatre.
A historically significant building stands restored and alive - a permanent base where ASHTAR trains the next generation of Palestinian theatre-makers, stages original work, and welcomes the community through its doors. It anchors cultural life in Birzeit's Old City, supports the local economy, and gives Palestinian theatre the lasting institutional home it has never had. It also lays the physical foundation for the wider performing arts campus that ASHTAR and its partners will build next.
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