06/01/2026
One of the reasons that the MPF is so successful in its efforts is the support of its remarkable board of directors. Each brings special expertise and enthusiasm for preservation.
We were delighted to see innovative board member, Michelle Donovan operator of Mesa's Nile Theatre featured in Sunday's Arizona Republic.
We are happy to share the article with you. If you can't open it, the full text is below:
She once lined up for concerts, now she hold keys to the Nile Theater
Maritza Dominguez
Arizona Republic
May 17, 2026 Updated May 20, 2026, 6:49 a.m. MT
On any given day in downtown Mesa, dozens of concert attendees line the street waiting to enter the more than century-old Nile Theater.
As a teenager, Michelle Donovan was one of those girls waiting to attend a "hardcore" show. Decades later, she manages the venue.
Donovan and her family moved from Ohio to the East Valley when she was a pr***en. She remembers doing a story on The Nile Theater for her school newspaper and being “in awe,” she said.
To this day, she still has the Saves the Day T-shirt she bought at that show, which over the years has worn thin with holes, but she still wears it around her home. Live music and concerts were a release for Donovan as a teenager and as an adult.
"Being able to provide concerts for people to go to, to like get away from like every day life, I feel like it's important," Donovan said.
The Nile Theater has been a fixture in downtown Mesa for 102 years. It opened in 1924 on Main Street in downtown Mesa as a “movie palace” and was the first “air-cooled” building in the state.
Over the years, it housed various retail businesses until it was reopened in 1994 as a rock club. It later gained a sordid reputation, even prompting the Maricopa County Superior Court in 2002 to place a permanent court order restricting how it could operate.
That effectively closed The Nile Theater; for many years afterward, it operated as a church.
That is until one day in 2009 when Donovan got a call from a friend telling her the building was up for lease.
How Donovan took on the Nile
Before Donovan started managing The Nile, she was working at the Marquee, a Tempe concert venue, doing marketing and booking talent.
She and a group of friends had an idea to manage their own venue and were looking at areas in Tempe when she got that fateful call from her friend.
“We're like there's no way and like within I want to say a week or something we had the keys,” she said.
That started Donovan's nearly 17-year journey to repair the Nile's reputation, bring concerts back to the venue and opening the adjacent vegan coffee shop.
One major hurdle for Donovan and the Nile was getting that infamous court order lifted and regaining the venue's liquor license. Alcohol sales are a major revenue source for the business, and Donovan said she wasn’t sure it would still be open today without it.
Six years later, Donovan opened the Nile coffee shop after the building's previous tenant left in 2015. She said the shop has been a “huge plus” because it’s a “face for the venue” and an added community space.
Ben Talty, an employee of concert promotion company Mantooth Group, commended Donovan for her dedication to the venue, calling her an "icon."
“She has been the rock that has held this place together since its inception,” he said.
He said Donovan's savvy and said her music business connections have been pivotal to keeping The Nile’s success.
“I've been very fortunate to have been brought on as a second arm to her,” he said.
Why the Nile matters to Donovan and the larger community
For years, downtown Mesa has been a sleepy district with limited activity. The Nile was one of the few spaces that brought the area to life at night, attracting hundreds of people to the area for live music.
One of Donovan’s goals with The Nile was to help revitalize downtown. She previously volunteered on the Downtown Mesa Association’s board and was on a city downtown committee.
“If we want to see the city grow, we have to make a commitment to being open and present and everything that we do like lends itself to that,” she said.
She made it a priority to open the space outside of normal hours, holding neighborhood meetings for light rail and Arizona State University development and hosting free yoga classes on Saturdays.
Building the space was important for her because she felt the more time people spent in downtown, the more city pride it would create, she said.
Donovan’s footprint in downtown Mesa expands
Downtown Mesa is seeing a resurgence, partly as a result of the city's efforts to dedicate resources to redevelopment and because of the work of people like Donovan.
“Michelle saw it long before we did,” said Jeff McVay, Mesa’s urban transformation director.
McVay worked with Donovan when she applied for a grant to improve the building’s facade. He called the Nile’s improvement the “poster child” of the city's downtown facade improvement program. He commended Donovan for working with the city and the landlord as the middleman to get that done.
The improvement didn’t stop there. For the building’s centennial, Donovan raised the funds to install a replica of the 1920s marquee.
“She is always about this place and making it better,” McVay said.
But Donovan wasn't done with the Nile Theater and coffee shop. She was just getting started.
In 2023, she opened Nile Records, a record store that also operates as the theater's box office. She said she always wanted to open a spot in the nearby Green Belt Shops along MacDonald in downtown.
“I just thought it was cute, which is not a great reason to open a business, but the landlord knew that I was looking at potentially doing something in there,” she said.
In 2025, she transformed a former HVAC company store into The Rosetta Room, a 400-person standing room concert venue several blocks from the Nile. It was named the best new music venue by the Phoenix New Times that same year.
With that new venue opening, Donovan had planned to sunset the underground basement concert space at the Nile because it isn’t ADA accessible, but the demand has continued for all three concert spaces, she said.
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What’s in store for the future?
Donovan said she’s not letting go of The Nile anytime soon or even her investment in downtown, even if she’s thought about it in the past.
When she was going through a divorce, Donovan said she seriously contemplated stepping away. She said she kept thinking, “I have a daughter, and I can't be at a concert venue 15 hours a day and do a good job.”
However, Donovan realized that that thought came from a place of fear. Once she got past that, she was able to put it behind her, she said.
The Nile is a space where she has raised her 12-year-old daughter and that helped shape her as a person, Donovan said.
“I think being around here has made her very open-minded, very accepting of people,” she said.
Not only has The Nile given Donovan a place for her daughter, but also for the larger community.
“I feel that these types of spaces are important for younger people to like have a space where they can feel comfortable and they can be themselves, “she said. “Maybe they didn't fit in outside of this place, but when everybody comes here for a show like everybody's where they're supposed to be.”
As a teen, Michelle Donovan was in awe of The Nile Theater in Mesa. As an adult, she's dedicated to keeping the space open for the community.
