The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) is a New York City-based theater company and workshop established in 1967 by producer-actor Robert Hooks, playwright Douglas Turner Ward, and theater manager Gerald S. Krone, with funding from the Ford Foundation. The company's focus on original works with themes based in the black experience with an international perspective created a canon of theatrical works and an audience for writers who came later, such as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

The Negro Ensemble Company was created in 1964 when Hooks created a tuition-free acting workshop for urban youth which he named the Group Theatre Workshop (GTW), in tribute to Harold Clurman's The Group Theatre. The group became a refuge for young minority actors, with a focus on black theatre. He and his associate Barbara Ann Teer produced in a one-night showcase for friends and family of the actors. The plays chosen were Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool and Douglas Turner Ward's Happy Ending.

Jerry Tallmer, reviewer for the New York Post, happened to attend this showcase and gave it a glowing review. This inspired Hooks to produce Happy Ending and Ward's Day of Absence as a double bill presented by Robert Hooks Productions. After raising $35,000 from music executives Clarence Avant and Al Bell, Hooks booked the St. Mark's Playhouse (where many black performers had performed in the long-running show, The Blacks) and hired Gerald Krone as company manager.

Ward was invited by the New York Times to write an opinion piece for its Sunday edition on the state of black theatre. His piece, "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", published in August 1966, was a scathing indictment of America's theatre establishment and posited the need for a unique black theatre institution.

This article caused McNeil Lowery of the Ford Foundation contact Ward to set up a meeting with Ward, Hooks, and Krone. Invited to present a proposal, they came with a bid for an ensemble company much like Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. The concept of a true ensemble company (a nucleus of actors performing a roster of plays back-to-back within each season) was uncommon in American theatre. A theatre based on the black experience, created and staffed by black artists, was even more of a departure. In the legacy of the Group Theatre Workshop, this new theatre incorporated a workshop providing tuition-free acting, directing, writing, and theatre administration instruction, which was intended to raise a new generation of theatre professionals. The proposal was accepted and they were awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant to establish the company.

From the beginning, they resisted demands that the new company be located in Harlem and instead, sought out a space downtown where they could build on the existing theatre audience while cultivating an informed black theatre-going audience that hadn't previously existed on a significant scale. They chose the St. Mark's Playhouse primarily because of its flexible configuration.

During this era of Black Power, the decision to use the term "Negro", rather than the more current "Black", was controversial. The name was intended as a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance and the legacy of its artists (Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Ethel Waters, etc.), some of whom were still alive and living in New York at the time. The term "New Negro", made popular by philosopher and journalist Alain Locke, was used during the Harlem Renaissance to invoke an outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit to the practices and laws of Jim Crow.

Krone, who was serving as administrative director for the company, was Caucasian, which caused some vocal protest from black nationalists.