TULSA, Okla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 3, 2026--
Venu Holding Corporation ("VENU" or the “Company”) (NYSE AMERICAN: VENU), an owner, operator, and developer of premium live entertainment destinations, and Northeastern State University (NSU), Oklahoma's oldest institution of higher education, today announced a long-term partnership with VENU's Regent Bank Amphitheater in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
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Under the multi-year partnership agreement, NSU becomes the Official University of Regent Bank Amphitheater. The partnership extends to NSU students' system-wide, across campuses in Tahlequah, Muskogee, Broken Arrow and online, and is designed to broaden students’ access to scholarships, academic programming and real-world career opportunities.
As part of the exclusive agreement, VENU and NSU will work together to invest in student success and strengthen the arts and culture that define Broken Arrow, Tulsa and Northeast Oklahoma. That partnership takes shape through academic opportunities for NSU students, including internships and practicums with VENU, along with guest speaker activations and other programming support across NSU's academic offerings.
Regent Bank Amphitheater will also welcome NSU on-site throughout the year, hosting student-focused events, including an annual College Night built around NSU students. The programming is targeted to begin in conjunction with the venue's targeted Fall 2026 opening.
“Partnerships like this demonstrate what is possible when higher education and the private sector come together around a shared commitment to student success and the future of our communities,” said Rodney Hanley, President of Northeastern State University. “Regent Bank Amphitheater will create an extraordinary new venue for entertainment and culture in northeast Oklahoma, but this partnership allows NSU students to experience something even more valuable, opportunities to learn, build professional relationships and gain firsthand experience in a growing industry. We are proud to be the Official University of Regent Bank Amphitheater and look forward to creating meaningful opportunities for our students across all of our campuses.”
“Regent Bank Amphitheater is going to have a significant impact on Broken Arrow and northeast Oklahoma, and we are excited to connect NSU students directly to that opportunity through internships, practicums, academic programming, scholarships and real-world experiences,” said Dan Mabery, Vice President for University Relations and External Affairs at Northeastern State University. “This partnership also reinforces NSU’s role as a university that connects education to the workforce and to the communities we serve. We are particularly excited about the opportunity to bring our students into the heart of Oklahoma’s growing entertainment and creative economy.”
"Regent Bank Amphitheater was built to be more than a stage. It's meant to be a gathering place that gives back to the people and institutions that make Oklahoma the incredible state that it is," said J.W. Roth, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of VENU. "Partnering with Northeastern State University lets us do that in a lasting way, opening doors for students across the state, not just the ones who live nearby. We are excited to enrich the local educational ecosystem through this exciting collaboration."
Once open, Regent Bank Amphitheater is projected to generate $4.3 billion in total economic impact in the first 20 years of operation for the greater Broken Arrow region. The collaboration with NSU builds on that momentum, extending the venue's impact beyond entertainment and into education, giving VENU a lasting role in the communities it serves.
The agreement was facilitated in collaboration with Connect Partnership Group.
About Venu Holding Corporation
Venu Holding Corporation ("VENU") (NYSE American: VENU) is a premier owner, developer, and operator of luxury, experience-driven entertainment destinations. Founded by Colorado Springs entrepreneur J.W. Roth, VENU ® has a portfolio of premium brands that includes Ford Amphitheater, Regent Bank Amphitheater, Sunset Amphitheaters, Phil Long Music Hall, The Hall at Bourbon Brothers, Bourbon Brothers Smokehouse and Tavern, Aikman Owners Clubs, and Roth’s Sea & Steak. With venues operating and in development across Colorado, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas and a nationwide expansion underway, VENU is setting a new standard for live entertainment.
VENU has been recognized nationally by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Times, Billboard, VenuesNow, and Variety for its innovative and disruptive approach to live entertainment. Through strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as AEG Presents, NFL Hall of Famer and Founder of EIGHT Elite Light Beer, Troy Aikman, Aramark Sports + Entertainment, Tixr, Niall Horan, and Dierks Bentley, VENU continues to shape the future of the entertainment landscape. For more information, visit VENU’s website, Instagram, LinkedIn, or X.
About Northeastern State University
Northeastern State University is Oklahoma’s oldest institution of higher education. NSU offers workforce-ready degrees at campuses in Tahlequah, Muskogee and Broken Arrow, as well as online. From its humble beginnings as the Cherokee National Female Seminary and through its evolution as a teacher’s college and present-day comprehensive university, NSU is proud of its role to provide a quality, affordable education in Northeast Oklahoma and to serve the educational, cultural and workforce needs of our region and beyond.
About Regent Bank Amphitheater
Regent Bank Amphitheater is a next-generation, premium multi-seasonal live entertainment destination developed through a public-private partnership between Venu Holding Corporation (“VENU”) and the City of Broken Arrow. Targeted to open Fall 2026 with a capacity of 12,500, the venue features more than 230 Luxe FireSuites ® and the Aikman Club, created in partnership with NFL Hall of Famer Troy Aikman, delivering a live experience unlike anything built in Oklahoma. Strategic partners include Regent Bank, Northeastern State University, EIGHT Elite Light Beer, Aramark Sports + Entertainment, Connect Partnership Group, Pepsi, Boingo, Tangram, Dreamseat, L-Acoustics, and Dimensional Innovations. A marquee addition to VENU's growing portfolio of luxury, experience-driven destinations redefining live entertainment across the country.
Visit regentbankamphitheater.com for more information.
Forward Looking Statements
Certain statements in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Words such as "may," "might," "will," "should," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "continue," "predict," "forecast," "project," "plan," "intend" or similar expressions, or statements regarding intent, belief, or current expectations, are forward-looking statements. While Venu believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on any such forward-looking statements, which are based on information available to us on the date of this release. These forward-looking statements are based upon current estimates and assumptions and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation those set forth in the company’s filings with the SEC, not limited to Risk Factors relating to its business contained therein. Thus, actual results could be materially different. Venu expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements whether because of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
VENU's Regent Bank Amphitheater Partners with Northeastern State University to Further Arts and Education in Oklahoma
NEW YORK (AP) — Gloria Steinem, the celebrated author and activist who became one of the most visible symbols and potent voices of the U.S. women’s movement and a fierce advocate for feminist causes throughout her life, has died. She was 92.
With her trademark streaked hair parted down the middle and large aviator glasses, Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. Magazine, was a hugely recognizable presence wherever she went. And she went everywhere: Much of her life as an advocate was spent on the road, speaking at college campuses and community centers, at rallies and marches.
She died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her and her foundation’s social media pages.
“Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard,” the posts said. “Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.”
Steinem enjoyed writing and spending time in the community in recent years, the posts said. She also hosted talking circles for hundreds of people in her home. She died just before a planned memoir was to be released this fall.
“You can’t do it on the phone or on the web,” she told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview. “You have to be there with all five senses. It should be obvious that people can’t empathize with each other unless we’re in the same room.”
She began her career as a journalist, notably one who reported, in 1963, on degrading conditions in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire, an undercover assignment she came to later regret. She credits a meeting six years later, where women spoke out boldly in favor of abortion rights, with changing her career path.
“That speak-out was the beginning of activism for me,” Steinem, who had undergone a secret illegal abortion herself at age 22, told the AP in an email in 2022, reflecting on the reversal of Roe v Wade. “Either our control over our own bodies is equal, regardless of sex or race, or we’re not living in a democracy.”
Though she soon became a known activist, those who watched Steinem denounce discrimination for so many years likely never suspected that she’d had to overcome a deep fear of public speaking. She would have simply stuck to writing, she said, if only editors at the time had been willing to let her write about the women’s movement.
But they weren’t interested, she told the AP in 2015. “So I ended up going out and speaking, which was my nightmare,” she said. “I mean, I was terrified. But I’m grateful, even though I still get scared even now.”
Time hardly slowed Steinem down; well into her 80s she was traveling the globe and speaking out on issues of importance to her. These included everything from genital mutilation to Korean reconciliation, but it was equality for women that took precedence. “Being a feminist means that you see the world as whole instead of half,” she once said. “It shouldn’t need a name, and one day it won’t.”
As the years went on, Steinem’s visibility endured. At 83, she sat in the front row of her first fashion show, guest of designer Prabal Gurung. A few days after her 85th birthday, she was leading a women’s “talking circle” at an off-Broadway play celebrating her life, where one by one, women in the audience — many fighting tears — rose to thank her and tell their own stories of discrimination. In 2020, her life was the subject of a feature film, “The Glorias, A Life on The Road,” based on her 2015 memoir and starring Julianne Moore.
And at 91, she collaborated on a picture book with Liberian peace activist and Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee aimed at inspiring young people to change the world. “Rise, Girl, Rise: Our Sister-Friend Journey. Together for All” was published in February.
The constant visibility came with a price; even into her older years, Steinem expressed frustration that despite her accomplishments, she was often described as beautiful or glamorous (A 1992 Vanity Fair profile even noted her “spectacular racehorse legs.”) It was a label she said unfairly detracted from her message.
“Nobody ever called me beautiful until I was publicly a feminist, and that was in my mid-30s,” she told AP in a 2011 interview. “It was clear that label was being assigned to me. The most hurtful part is that you work very hard, and people say it’s because of your looks.”
Of course, Steinem also had to deal with hostility. Sometimes it came from surprising places. Appearing on Larry King’s talk show on CNN in 1990, she was visibly stunned when a female caller greeted her cheerfully, then told her to “rot in hell” because she had ruined “the beautiful American family.”
But by then, she noted, at least people were taking feminists seriously. That wasn’t the case in 1972 when she co-founded Ms. Magazine and many commentators — especially male — dismissed it as ridiculous, predicting an early demise. (The magazine continues to this day, published by the Feminist Majority Foundation.)
Among Steinem’s detractors was President Richard Nixon, who was caught on an Oval Office tape ridiculing both her and the “Ms.” title. The ridicule was mutual: In a 1972 National Press Club speech, Steinem called Nixon “the most sexually insecure chief of state since Napoleon.”
It was just one example of Steinem’s trademark wit. Before she married at 66, she often explained her singlehood by saying “I can’t mate in captivity.” Laughter, she wrote, was “the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled.”
In 2013, Steinem was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. “Because of her work across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve,” he said, “but she also changed how women thought about themselves.”
Gloria Marie Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. Her father was a traveling antique salesperson; she spent her early years on the road with her parents, not attending regular school. “I just read everything I could get my hands on,” she told an audience at Manhattan’s 92Y in 2026. “Which was frequently completely unsuitable ... just everything and anything. I also was in love with the movies — my idea of heaven was a movie and a malted.”
In 1944 her parents divorced, and 10-year-old Gloria was left to take care of her mother. a once-promising journalist who struggled to combine her work with running a household, and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.
As a young girl she excelled at tap dancing — it was even going to be her “ticket out of Toledo,” she said. Although she remained a good dancer, that particular career didn’t materialize. She attended Smith College in the ’50s, a time when, she has said, women were being educated to be mothers and wives.
But marriage was not on Steinem’s mind. “I was engaged to a very nice man. It wasn’t his fault, but I just didn’t want to get married,” she told her 2026 audience. Instead, she took advantage of a modest fellowship to travel to India. After that, Steinem headed to Manhattan, where she couldn’t rent her own apartment because, she said, landlords avoided single women, assuming “if you could earn enough, you must be a hooker.”
The aspiring journalist wanted to write about politics. But editors gave her assignments on food, fashion, and, in what she jokingly called “the lowpoint of my life,” an article about textured stockings. Even more demoralizing was her experience with an editor who, she said, gave her a choice one day: Spend the afternoon in a hotel with him, or mail his letters on the way out.
She chose to mail the letters. “There was no word for sexual harassment then,” she has said. “It was just life.”
But one assignment in 1963 sounded compelling: posing as a Playboy Bunny, for an exposé in the now-defunct Show magazine. Steinem went through the audition process, assuming she’d be weeded out. But she was given her bunny costume — “so tight, it would give a man a cleavage,” she joked — and worked in the job for about a month.
“I could not have made a bigger mistake,” she told the AP in 2011. “It was personally and professionally a disaster. In the short term, it was much harder to get assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.”
Steinem was in her 30s when she joined the editorial board of New York magazine, and her writing became more political. In 1969, she went to cover an abortion rights hearing. She had never told anyone about her illegal abortion at 22, in London. That was the moment, she has said, that triggered her career as a women’s rights activist. “I don’t think I had ever felt part of a group before,” she said in a 1970 TV interview.
Steinem founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 along with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug. The latter became a dear lifelong friend — “the woman I wished I had had as a mother,” she said at Abzug’s funeral.
Unlike Abzug, Steinem was naturally reserved, not comfortable in front of a crowd. Gradually, with her early speaking partner Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black feminist and child welfare advocate, she found her footing. The two formed a powerful partnership at a time when feminism was viewed as largely a white, middle-class movement. In an iconic photo, the two raise their right arms together in the Black Power salute.
As she grew more famous, Steinem drew attention not just for her work but for a glamorous Manhattan life. Asked once about her streaked hair and aviator glasses, she explained that the hair was inspired by Holly Golightly, the free-spirited character played by Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The glasses? They were “more about hiding,” she said.
When reaction was hostile, Steinem would try to reason that it was a step above ridicule. But sometimes it stung, like a snarky Esquire profile in the early ’70s, so hurtful that she cried, and colleagues called a news conference to defend her.
Then came Ms. Magazine in 1972, a magazine by women, for women. “I was so obsessed with the fear that it would fail and be a disgrace to the movement,” Steinem, age 37 when it launched, told the AP in 2011. And opponents hoped that would happen. TV newsman Harry Reasoner, an especially tart critic, later apologized on air. Steinem continued with Ms. until it was bought in 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation, and remained an adviser.
By 1977, numerous gains had been made for women, including Roe in 1973. But the Equal Rights Amendment, which had passed the House and Senate in 1972 but needed to be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures, remained elusive. The issue was front and center at the 1977 National Women’s Conference, convened on a congressional mandate to examine women’s rights.
“If they want us to become the radicals that they fear we are, just let them stop the ERA and we will become those radicals,” Steinem said there.
Among groups Steinem co-founded were the Women’s Action Alliance, which was active through the 1990s; the Women’s Media Center in 2004, the Voters for Choice political action committee in 1977, and the Ms. Foundation for Women. She also helped establish the Take Our Daughters to Work Day.
Steinem never had her own children, and said she never regretted it. “No, not for a millisecond,” she told the AP, describing an incident in which she was afraid to answer that question in front of a group of women in India, fearing they wouldn’t like the answer. “But they applauded,” she said. “It’s important that some of us not have children, to show that we have a choice.”
In 2000, Steinem she did something she’d never planned to: She got married, at 66, to British activist and businessman David Bale, whom she met at a fundraiser (Bale was the father of actor Christian Bale.)
“I thought, ‘I haven’t changed, marriage had changed,’” Steinem said. “David and I wanted to be together, we loved each other. He needed a green card.” They married at a Cherokee ceremony in Oklahoma. Several years later, he became ill with brain lymphoma, and Steinem cared for him until his death in 2003.
Steinem said she had few regrets in life, but did miss being present when her father died. She received word that he’d been in a serious car accident, but did not respond in time, and he died alone. “I had taken care of my mom as a child, and I feared I’d never come back,” she explained. She was also sorry that she didn’t become closer to her mother. “I was so fearful of becoming her,” she said in an HBO documentary, “Gloria: In Her Own Words.”
Steinem’s books included the 2015 road memoir “A Life on the Road” — but she wryly noted at the time that she’d actually never learned to drive. It would have taken away, she said, from her ability to converse with her hosts, who would pick her up from airports or train stations. And, she noted, she always loved to chat with taxi drivers.
On Jan. 21, 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington in their pink “pussy hats” for the historic Women’s March, it surprised nobody that the keynote speaker, and the most rousing, was Steinem.
“We are linked,” she told the crowd. “And this is a day that will change us forever because we are together.”
For many women, Steinem was the galvanizing voice that day. She would go on to advocate fiercely. But, though many saw her as a singular figure in history, she often liked to say that if she hadn’t come along, someone else would have accomplished the same things.
By the same token, she said, it was less important that younger people listen to her, and more important that they listen to themselves.
“The primary thing is not that they know who I am,” she said, “but that they know who THEY are.”
FILE - Leading supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment march in Washington, July 9, 1978, urging Congress to extend the time for ratification of the ERA. From left are: Gloria Steinem; Dick Gregory; Betty Friedan; Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y. (partially obscured); Rep. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.; and Rep. Margaret Heckler, R-Mass. The women at far left and right are unidentified. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook, File)
FILE - Gloria Steinem, secretary of Women USA, left, and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, president of Women USA, answer questions at a press conference in Washington, Nov. 20, 1979. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges, File)
FILE - Women's rights spokeswoman Gloria Steinem attends a news conference at the American Civil Liberties Union office in New York, July 12, 1973. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
FILE - New York Governor Kathy Hochul, left, Anna Wintour and Gloria Steinem attend the Michael Kors Fall/Winter 2023 fashion show in New York on Feb. 15, 2023. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
Gloria Steinem, Journalist and Activist talks during the Forbes 30/50 Summit at the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
FILE - Gloria Steinem speaks during the 2021 Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony in Oviedo, northern Spain, Oct. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez, File)
