Who Owns Meow Wolf?

Meow Wolf began in 2008 as a loose DIY art collective in Santa Fe. Its founders, artists including Vince Kadlubek, Sean Di Ianni, Matt King, Corvas Brinkerhoff, Emily Montoya, and Caity Kennedy, built immersive installations from salvaged materials and threw warehouse parties to fund them. The collective's name was drawn at random from two words pulled out of a hat.

For years the group produced temporary installations around Santa Fe and toured work to festivals. The turning point came in 2015 when George R.R. Martin purchased a defunct bowling alley on Rufina Circle and offered it to the collective. With about $2.5 million raised from Martin and other investors, Meow Wolf spent two years building out the space.

House of Eternal Return opened on March 18, 2016. The nonlinear, explorable installation, anchored by a Victorian house hiding portals to other worlds, drew 400,000 visitors in its first year, an extraordinary figure for a market of Santa Fe's size. The collective incorporated as a company, took on outside investment, and set out to replicate the model nationally.

Omega Mart opened inside Las Vegas's AREA15 complex in February 2021, followed by Convergence Station in Denver in September 2021. The Real Unreal opened in Grapevine, Texas, in 2023, and Radio Tave opened in Houston in October 2024. Each location operates as a distinct world tied into a shared narrative universe.

Growth brought strain. The company laid off staff in April and December 2024, citing overexpansion and the cost of new projects, and faced unionization efforts by the Meow Wolf Workers Collective at its original site. In March 2025 it announced a seventh permanent exhibition at New York's South Street Seaport, and it confirmed its sixth, in a former movie theater at Los Angeles's Howard Hughes Center, for a 2026 opening. A new financing round closed in 2025 to fund both projects.