A 300-seat theater on Southeast Division Street in Portland with a curious past is giving notable talents such as David Byrne and Ruth E. Carter a new stage on which to tell their stories: the Tomorrow Theater. The venue, which is part of the Portland Art Museum’s film-and-new-media Center for an Untold Tomorrow (Pam Cut), features a cinema and creative hub aimed at challenging conventional forms of storytelling, providing a platform for artists to connect with audiences in fresh ways.

About a year ago, when the project was in its early stages, Amy Dotson, director of Pam Cut and inaugural curator of film and new media at the Portland Art Museum, says she began to sense a trend from multimedia artists within her community — they no longer wanted to be siloed into one role such as filmmaker, podcaster or animator. The solution to this could be the development of a new venue,...