Bezdek Center for the Performing Arts
Why Build a Performing Arts Center?
Crossroads was founded on the belief that the arts are essential to education. When children have the opportunity to develop their creative, imaginative and expressive abilities, they become excited about learning. They feel a great sense of pride and accomplishment. And they become absorbed in exploring, discovering and creating.
Through the arts, children are connected to the past, but are given the inspiration to imagine the future. The arts help us understand our interconnectedness—to look for the commonalities between cultures.
Despite the vitality of our award-winning performing arts programs in drama, dance, filmmaking and music, our faculty and students have been hampered by facilities that severely limit their ability to properly showcase their talents.
The Bezdek Center for the Performing Arts is the third and most financially ambitious step in the School’s Worlds Unimagined Capital Campaign. The time has come to give our students and faculty state-of-the-art teaching, performance and rehearsal spaces to match the exceptional programming that Crossroads offers today.
In addition to its transformative impact on the performing arts at Crossroads, the Bezdek Center will benefit the entire School community, as well as our neighbors in Santa Monica and beyond. The 650-seat Stern Family Theater is large enough to hold the entire Middle or Upper School indoors, something no other space on the 21st Street Campus can accommodate. The Equity & Justice Seminar Room will host meetings and presentations for faculty and staff and the Board of Trustees. The School will also rent out spaces in the facility to outside organizations, particularly our nonprofit community partners, for meetings, speaking engagements and performances.
When it opens in 2026, the The Bezdek Center for the Performing Arts will dramatically increase our ability to offer more programs and resources that challenge our students to stretch the limits of their creativity.
List of 1 news stories.
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Tony Hundtoft
“As we’ve seen the number of students grow, our actual space and facilities have remained the same. We’re maxed out in terms of the number of students we can fit in these rooms for rehearsal, and just how many rehearsals we’re able to run simultaneously or throughout the course of a day.”
