Housing and Residential Life closed Risley Theatre and its workshops for the Fall 2025 semester to conduct health and safety reviews. Tensions within the Risley community come to head as its organizations struggle to access funds and practice spaces within the residential house, pushing the annual Rocky Horror Picture Show to relocate its annual production under booking policy changes.
Members of the Risley Ministry for Arts and Shops Development returned from summer break to signs posted on the doors of Risley’s basement workshops stating their closure, and to contact Cornell Environment, Health and Safety for more information.
The Shops are a collection of artist workshops in the basement of Risley Residential College for Risley residents and out-of-house members, Cornell students who live outside of Risley and applied to use the workshops by completing a form on CampusGroups. The workshops are used to work on artistic projects ranging from a sound studio and garden to pottery.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Risley has struggled to open the Shops, with the 2024-2025 academic year being the first year that most of the workshops were open for use, according to RMASD President Leah Becker ’27. The return notice of the Risley Shops to closure confused RMASD because they had already been working with EHS last year to get the workshops up to safety standards, Becker added.
“When we got back from the summer, we saw signs on all the doors of the shops saying that the shops were closed and to contact [EHS] for some safety review,” Becker ’27 said. “[RMASD] had been in contact with [Cornell] EHS all of last year to properly dispose of … some paints and other chemicals that needed to be given to EHS to dispose of properly.”
In an Oct. 1 email received by Risley residents from Housing and Residential Life, the Risley Theatre closed alongside the workshops for condition review and assessment and is not expected to reopen before the end of the Fall 2025 semester.
According to Risley residents, such as Becker, the shops are a large part of the draw for Risley as a program house.
“Definitely a lot of the freshmen that I've talked to said that they chose to live in Risley because they saw on the website advertising about the art shops,” Becker said
In addition to the closure of the workshops and theatre, Rita Kelly ’26 and Riona Yu ’26, co-directors for Risley’s yearly production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, discovered that they were no longer able to use the Risley Dining Room to host the show — breaking a historic 30-year streak of the show’s production held in the dining room.
“They told us that all events not directly associated with dining would have to be not done in the dining hall, basically, and that was very frustrating because they hadn't reached out and told us before the semester started, or even before we started planning,” Kelly told The Sun.
When asked about what led to Rocky Horror production to lose its long-standing tradition of hosting in the Risley dining room, HRL told The Sun that the decision was made in order to help “preserve” Risley certification as a dining hall free of peanuts, gluten and tree-nuts for guests with food allergies.
“To avoid endangering guests, Cornell Dining stopped permitting events in Risley Dining Room without supervision in Fall 2024 in order to better control and monitor what was being brought into the dining room,” HRL wrote in an email statement to The Sun.
With the closure of Risley Theatre and no access to the dining hall, Kelly and Yu have relocated the Rocky Horror Picture Show to the third floor multipurpose room in Appel Commons. However, the show has faced issues with funding in light of the closures within Risley.
“We're supposed to get $500 for costumes and props that break and things like that, but there has been so much turnover in the last couple of months to a year that, rumor has it, we lost access to the funds and we don't know how to get them back,” Kelly said. “So we have been discussing paying for a lot of the show out of pocket.”
A HRL spokesperson stated that Risley has funds allocated to support events and residential programming. Only the funding for community programming is currently in use.
“Risley Hall, like all other residential spaces on campus, has programming funds allocated to support events and programs for residents,” an HRL representative wrote in an email statement to The Sun. “This funding is still in place and is being used for community programming. Any funding specifically allocated for the Risley Shops or Theatre, separate from programming funds, has been held due to the closure of the Shops and Theatre at this time.”
With the future usage of the workshops and theatre next semester still uncertain and no access to their allocated funds, Risleyites struggle to find support from HRL, according to Kelly.
“Intentional or not, [it] just makes us feel like we've been targeted as a safe space for artists, for creators, for queer people,” said Kelly.
When asked about its response to students feeling that Risley and its queer community are being unfairly targeted, HRL spokesperson told The Sun that it will continue to support its student life.
“Housing and Residential Life, and Cornell University, support and celebrate the diverse student community that we serve,” HRL wrote in an email statement to The Sun. “The evaluation of the space in Risley Hall is focused on facilities and is not a targeted action based on the community who resides there.”
Correction, Nov. 11, 3 a.m.: The article has been updated to remove a section about residents and out-of-house members paying a fee for services at Risley Hall.
Anjelina Gonzalez is a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at agonzalez@cornellsun.com.
