Forest Forward Updates on Forest Theater Restoration

Forest Forward has raised $35 million of its $75 million goal for a South Dallas cultural campus built around the Forest Theater on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The organization shared that figure at a community meeting last August, held not for press or city officials but for residents.

The meeting took place at Forest Forward’s headquarters across the street from the theater, a former liquor store the nonprofit bought in 2022. That location mattered. Organizers used the evening to walk neighbors through construction timelines, introduce new leadership, and take stock of what people actually want from a project this large.

Elizabeth Wattley, Forest Forward’s president and CEO, laid out the money. The $35 million raised so far includes $8 million from the City of Dallas and $4 million in Housing and Urban Development funds. That’s a meaningful foundation. It’s also $40 million short of the total.

The restored theater’s design calls for a 1,000-seat concert hall capable of hosting live performances, film screenings, and festivals. There’s a rooftop terrace overlooking downtown, a 13,000-square-foot café, and a 25,000-square-foot outdoor plaza. Wattley said the team is sourcing high-grade projection equipment specifically to draw film festivals, not just touring acts.

The meeting also named Nijeul X as the organization’s new artistic director. Programming specifics weren’t shared publicly.

On local contracting, Wattley said nearly $19 million in work has already gone to Black-owned firms, with 78 percent of theater contracts awarded to minority- and women-owned businesses. She didn’t dress that up.

“We want to work with the community,” Wattley said. “Everything from catering to balloons, we want to work together and support businesses in the neighborhood.”

One block away, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Arts Academy is getting a separate $20 million bond-funded expansion that adds 25,000 square feet to the campus, including four science labs, a piano lab, and a 2,000-square-foot dance studio. The pre-K through eighth grade school is the only Dallas ISD campus of its kind, per Wattley.

She used Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts to put the access question in sharper terms.

“Out of the 1,100 students at Booker T., less than 1 percent came from this zip code,” Wattley said. “That’s not about talent, it’s about access and opportunity.”

The Forest Theater itself opened in 1949 as part of the historically Black cultural infrastructure that defined this stretch of MLK Boulevard. It went dark decades later, and the surrounding corridor has carried the marks of disinvestment ever since. A $75 million bet on this block doesn’t sit quietly in a neighborhood that’s watched promises come and go.

Displacement came up. Neighbors pressed Wattley and her team on what happens to property values and longtime residents when hundreds of millions of dollars land in a historically underinvested zip code. It’s the right question, and it wasn’t fully answered in one evening.

The Dallas Free Press has additional coverage of the August 2025 meeting for readers who want more on how those exchanges went.

Forest Forward still needs $40 million. The plans are drawn. The contractor percentages are set. What isn’t settled yet is whether the money comes in time to hold the schedule, and whether the community most affected by this corridor ends up with the kind of venue that actually belongs to them.