The Denver arts community will lose one of its rising leaders — and some of its national distinction — when Phamaly Theatre Company Artistic Director Regan Linton relocates to Washington, D.C., this year. A search for her replacement was announced Tuesday.

For the past 31 years, Phamaly has existed to create performance opportunities for people with disabilities. Linton, a performer with Phamaly since 2005, returned four years ago to rescue the company from catastrophic financial trouble. Since then, she has become a national voice for disability inclusion in the American theater.

The Denver East High School and University of Denver graduate remains the only artistic director of a professional American theater company in a wheelchair, according to Theatre Communications Group.

“I’m so proud that we have moved the company from huge challenges to a place of sustainable success,” said Linton, who has not felt sensation below her chest since a 2002 auto accident. “I have learned and grown so much in my time as Artistic Director, and am so grateful for everything Phamaly has given me.”

Linton said she is making the move to make more space in her life for performing and other projects. She says D.C. offers the perfect base to continue her advocacy for the disability community, and she does not rule out starting her own company there.

Linton will assist in the search for her replacement and personally mentor that hire through the transition. COVID-willing, Linton still will direct the company’s planned, original hip-hop adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” this summer.

Given the unique mission of Phamaly Theatre Company, Linton said she thinks her replacement should be someone who identifies with a disability. “I think that’s how this company will thrive the most,” she said. “Now that we have made that transition, there’s no going back.”

Phamaly is a signature theater company whose productions viscerally affect audiences unlike others. For “Chicago,” directed by Linton in 2019, accused murderer Roxy Hart was played by a woman with one hand. So when the actor sang, “We both reached for the gun,” that was an intentional visual joke unique to Phamaly. It’s part of the company’s identity.

Christy Montour-Larson, who directed Linton in Phamaly’s 2018 production of “Into the Woods,” said Linton has become “a shining national example” of what begets opportunity. “Regan is fearless and brave and she does what she does in a contagious and warm-hearted way,” Montour-Larson. “She inspires everybody around her to rise to her level of risk-taking.”

Linton, who has performed around the world for theater companies including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Mixed Blood (Minneapolis) Round House (Maryland) and Big-I (Japan), was named the True West Awards’ 2017 Colorado Theatre Person of the Year, in large part for her role in rescuing Phamaly from financial disaster. The company’s annual operating budget had more than doubled over seven years to $850,000. But revenue had not grown proportionally, and Phamaly was facing an immediate $250,000 shortfall.

“I committed to stay until either the company went down in flames or returned to a solid financial state,” Linton said.

She shaved the budget and released an uncommonly forthright public statement bluntly telling supporters that without an urgent cash infusion, Phamaly would be bankrupt within three months.

A multipronged fundraising campaign met its goal within 17 days, and Phamaly’s next production broke 30-year attendance records.

“If we were going to go down, then we were going to do it having been completely transparent with every one of our supporters,” Linton said. “But I feel like that wasn’t just people telling us, ‘We love this theater company.’ It was deeper than that. I feel like they were saying, ‘People with disabilities are valuable.’ And as a person who lives with a disability, that was really, powerfully meaningful to me.”

Montour-Larson is among those who say without Linton’s quick action then, Phamaly would not be here now. “Colorado would be so less rich without Phamaly, and I think everybody in the state owes her a great debt,” she said. “I can’t think of a theater company I admire more.”

Since 2017, Linton has secured funding from new national funders including the Ford Foundation, and Phamaly has been part of virtually every panel conversation about disability theater since.

In February, Phamaly took its children’s production of “Honk” to Japan. In 2019, the Kennedy Center hosted its annual national arts disability leadership conference in Denver and built it around Phamaly’s production of “Chicago.”

Financially, Linton said, Phamaly is in “a very stable place right now,” in spite of the COVID shutdown. The annual budget, before the shutdown, was back up to about $800,000.

“We have been smart and strategic about adjusting to the crisis and building contingencies,” she said. “In fact, Phamaly is as financially and operationally stable as it has ever been.”