The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced $36.8 million in grants to 1,474 individual artists, organizations, and museums across the United States today, January 14, in the first round of its Fiscal Year 2025 awards. Last year, the NEA and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), survived Republican-led proposed budget cuts.
Typically, the agency’s grants are announced in January and May, with a bulk of funding announced in spring. Last year’s January allocation totaled $32 million.
NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson said in a press release that the creative projects receiving funding this year will explore new ways to integrate arts and culture into communities. Recipients of the award hail from all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
Around $31.8 million in awards will fund specific programs to promote public engagement and arts education across the visual and performing arts through Grants for Art Projects. Northern Arizona University received $25,000 to support its Indigenous Youth Media Workshop, an 11-day program that pairs Indigenous high school students with established photographers, videographers, journalists, and other digital storytellers to create documentary-style stories.
Also focusing on young people, the Chicago urban design studio Territory NFP received $30,000 to support its public community center, Creating Space.
Some $2.7 million in funding was prioritized for small arts organizations that extend the outreach of arts to what the NEA designates as traditionally underserved communities, particularly those who may have less access to grant funding. These $10,000 awards, known as Challenge America grants, require organizations to share at least the equivalent amount in costs. One such 2025 grant was given to the Three Rivers Art Council in North Dakota to launch a Native artists’ residency with an emphasis on engaging students and the public through programming, including performances by flutist and flute maker and NEA National Heritage Fellow Bryan Akipa.
Eighteen organizations received Research Grants in the Arts of varying amounts, including the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, which was awarded $80,000 to conduct a study on how visiting an art museum can impact the well-being of adults.
Carnegie Mellon University also clinched $80,000 to study how university students utilize artificial intelligence for creative use to inform secondary education arts education.
Fifty-four museums across the US received NEA funding this year, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which was awarded $50,000, the highest possible amount, for educational programs for youth and older adults. Also receiving the highest grant amounts are the Grand Rapids Art Museum, which will fund an exhibition and public programming on human migration by artist Christopher Myers, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, which will use the funds to support staff salaries for an exhibition of works by Japanese printmaker Kōshirō Onchi.
More than $2.8 million in Grants for Arts Projects awards will be distributed to 105 film and media institutions, with the largest grants assigned to Art21 to support its Art in the Twenty-First Century” series and to the Bay Area Video Coalition for its MediaMaker documentary filmmaking fellowships.
NEA’s announcement comes days before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, who in his first term categorized NEA and the NEH as “wasteful and unnecessary funding.” Last summer, Oklahoma Republican House Representative Josh Brecheen proposed slashing $48 million from the agencies’ budgets as part of a bid to cut “woke, weaponized, and wasteful” federal spending. However, a majority of the House overwhelmingly voted to keep NEA and NEH funding intact, and in July the Senate approved $209 million for the NEA for the 2025 fiscal year, a $2 million increase from the previous year.
A full list of awardees can be viewed here.
Source link
