From the Research Team

Updates to State Arts Agency Artist Fellowships Strategy Sampler

NASAA has just released an update to the State Arts Agency Artist Fellowships Strategy Sampler. The updated strategy sampler draws on fiscal year 2020 Final Descriptive Report data and grant guidelines collected in 2022 to provide comparisons among 32 state arts agency (SAA) fellowship programs, with new data showing that SAAs granted over $4.7 million across 1,081 fellowship grants. The report details the variability in how these fellowship grants are administered and includes sections on grant award size and totals, the multiple eligibility factors that states consider, and the ways in which fellowship artistic disciplines are defined and applied across years.

The update also features a section on the work SAAs are doing to make fellowship awards more equitable. This includes:

using language within guidelines to encourage historically marginalized, underrepresented and rural and remote populations to apply;
convening diverse panelists with a variety of perspectives to adjudicate fellowship awards; and
offering larger grant awards to artists from underrepresented geographic areas.

While fellowships are a core part of how state arts agencies support artists and creative expression, they are only one part of a broader strategy to support individual artists. SAAs employ a variety of grants and programming to support artist-led projects, apprenticeships, and professional and creative development. You can read more about the range of SAA artist services in NASAA’s state to state archive. NASAA’s Individual Artist SAA Grant Making Fact Sheet also shows the breadth of grant funding for individual artists, which totaled over $12.8 million in FY2020. For more information about SAA fellowships or of the myriad ways in which SAAs support artists, contact NASAA Research Associate Declan Wicks.