Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College features musical events throughout the year. Theater by the Sea at Portsmouth presents classical and modern plays, and there is a year-round student theater at Dartmouth. Ballet groups include Ballet New England in Portsmouth, City Center Ballet in Lebanon, Granite State Ballet Company in Nashua, and Petit Papillon in Concord. Opera groups include the Granite State Opera in Temple, Opera North in Hanover, and OPERAFEST! of NH, based at the Adams Memorial Opera House in Derry. Classical music groups include the Nashua Chamber Orchestra, the Nashua Symphony Orchestra, the Granite State Symphony in Concord, Lakes Region Symphony Orchestra in Meredith, the New England Wind Ensemble in Franklin, and the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra and New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra (both in Manchester).
The New Hampshire Music Festival in Center Harbor serves as a year-round educational institute and performing arts center and sponsors an annual summer festival featuring the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra. Monadnock Music in Peterborough is an organization sponsoring a variety of musical programs, including an annual summer festival featuring the Monadnock Chorus and Orchestra.
New Hampshire's poet laureate from 1999 to 2004 has been Marie Harris, author of Weasel in the Turkey Pen, Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Memoir, and the children's book G is for GRANITE: A New Hampshire Alphabet. The artist laureate as of 2002 was Marguerite Mathews, who has worked in theater and has been an active participant in Council of the Arts education programs.
Principal galleries include the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, the Arts and Science Center in Nashua, the University Art Galleries at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, the Dartmouth College Museum and Galleries at Hanover, and the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter.
In 2003, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and other New Hampshire arts organizations received grants totaling $745,700 from the National Endowment for the Arts. State and private sources also contributed substantial funding to the state's arts programs. New Hampshire has about 275 statewide arts associations and 8 local arts councils.
The New Hampshire Humanities Council sponsors a number of ongoing programs including What Is New Hampshire Reading This Month?, a statewide reading program; The Giving Frame Of Mind, a reading/discussion series; Connections, a literacy program for adult new readers; and an annual summer Chautauqua. In 2000, the National Endowment for the Humanities contributed $1,344,638 to 15 state programs.