Artist Fellowships
Discipline Definitions
CHOREOGRAPHY
Eligible for review in even years. This category accepts performance work in all movement styles. We welcome dance, mixed-media, or multi-genre performances that feature organized movement of the human body(ies).
CRAFTS
Eligible for review in odd years. This category includes original work made substantially by hand. We welcome art centered on the skill and technique of manipulating glass, metal, wood, fiber, clay, and other materials.
DRAMATIC WRITING
Eligible for review in odd years. This category accepts original stageplays, musical theater works, screenplays, audiodramas, monologue/solo works, or other work written for performance. We welcome submissions by the primary creators of the work, as opposed to artists interpreting or adapting the work of others.
DRAWING & PRINTMAKING
Eligible for review in even years. This category includes work created using the techniques, materials, media, and methods of drawing and printmaking, collage, artists’ books, and computer-generated work.
FICTION/CREATIVE NONFICTION
Eligible for review in even years. This category accepts literary work in all varieties and genres. We welcome fiction novels, short stories, flash fiction, and graphic novels. We also welcome works of creative nonfiction with a strong narrative voice, such as memoir or personal essay. Critical, analytical, or scholarly work is not a good fit for this category.
FILM & VIDEO
Eligible for review in odd years. This category accepts original works of film and video. We welcome narrative film, documentaries, experimental film, animation, and video art. Applicants must have primary artistic/creative control of work they submit.
MUSIC COMPOSITION
Eligible for review in odd years. This category accepts original music and sound compositions. We welcome chamber, choral, electronic, symphonic, popular, band, musical theater, opera, and jazz music. We also welcome experimental and other sound compositions. Applicants must have primary artistic/creative control of work they submit.
PAINTING
Eligible for review in even years. This category includes original work that involves painting of any kind upon any surface. Artists who make engravings, etchings, lithographs, prints, serigraphs, woodcuts, and drawings should apply in the Drawing & Printmaking category.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Eligible for review in odd years. This category accepts original work in traditional and experimental photography. We welcome work where photography and photographic technique is central, including digital or software manipulation of photographs.
POETRY
Eligible for review in even years. This category includes original work in all forms and genres of poetry. We cannot accept translations.
SCULPTURE/INSTALLATION/NEW GENRES
Eligible for review in odd years. This category includes original three-dimensional sculpture, installation art, time-based media works of art, conceptually driven work, experimental, hybrid, and community-based practice in the visual arts.
TRADITIONAL ARTS
Eligible for review in even years. This category accepts work in traditional arts (music, craft, dance, and verbal arts) that reflect a cultural community’s shared sense of aesthetics and meaning. Traditional art is shaped by standards of excellence passed down from generation to generation, most often within familial, ethnic, tribal, religious, or occupational communities. Examples include music, sacred and secular crafts, occupational traditions like boatbuilding, quilting, and musical instrument making, folk and ethnic dance, and expressive culture associated with religious belief or seasonal celebrations.
Folk and traditional artists typically learn through day-to-day contact with someone steeped in the tradition, rather than through books, classes, or institutional instruction. Successful applicants practice the tradition with artistic depth and cultural sensitivity and are dedicated to sustaining the art form by mentoring others.
The Traditional Arts category is for individuals not groups. For more information, please contact Maggie Holtzberg, Folk Arts & Heritage Program Manager at 617-858-2713.
