Artist Residencies

The National Park Services offers opportunities for two-dimensional visual artists, photographers, sculptors, performers, writers, and composers to live and work in the parks.

This program provides support to schools or school systems to hire professional, practicing artists in a variety of disciplines to demonstrate how the arts can be integrated into the regular school curriculum. Residency activities include classroom instruction, field trips, in-service workshops and public exhibitions or performances. Residency artists work with interested teachers to suggest ways they can capitalize on the students' experiences and develop their own methods of enhancing creativity in the classroom.

The Alden B. Dow Creativity Center offers a short term residency to individuals in any field or profession who wish to pursue an innovative project or creative idea.

THIS AWARD IS BY NOMINATION ONLY--PLEASE DO NOT CONTACT. Academy Fellows are sought from the fine arts including painting, sculpture, music, film, and drama; scholarly disciplines such as art history, history, philosophy, sociology, political science, and public policy; as well as from professional fields including architecture, law, business, economics and journalism. Fellows are encouraged to take up an association with a Berlin institution such as a museum, library, archive, university, government agency, film studio or media organization. The facilities are wheelchair accessible.

Rome Prize winners pursue independent projects, which vary in content and scope, for periods ranging from six months to two years at the Academy. The Academy's Rome Prize winners are part of a residential community of 65 to 70 people each year. The artists and scholars who make up this multidisciplinary community also have the opportunity to foster their work through exchanges with members of the Italian and European artistic and scholarly communities.

Through the American Academy in Rome's Visiting Artists and Scholars program, artists and scholars of any nationality may apply to rent living and working space at the Academy for periods of no less than two weeks to a maximum of four months.

BY NOMINATION ONLY--PLEASE DO NOT CONTACT. To provide support for a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Four-week fellowships that aim to multiply and improve the ways in which an understanding of history is communicated to the American people.

Administered through the Forum’s chapters, the Community Partners Program place composers in collaborative residencies with community, cultural and educational organizations to create new works designed around the needs of their specific communities, many of which are historically underserved by the arts. Whether "community" is defined as residents of a neighborhood, students in a public school, members of a community center, or members of a religious congregation, the program seeks to engage people’s creative and expressive capacities, and to put composers’ skills in service of real and immediate needs. By partnering with cultural, educational and social services organizations, projects reach people who might otherwise have no opportunity or occasion to directly engage the arts, and do so in a context that makes their involvement personally and socially significant. The program is bridging the needless gap that has grown between music and ordinary community life. Through these projects, the Forum’s chapters have sponsored more than 200 residencies, commissions and performances, engaged scores of educational, cultural and social institutions in the creation and presentation of new music, and elicited growing support from a wide range of local and regional philanthropies.

Since 2001, 35 communities across the country have been selected to host composer residencies and mount musical celebrations expressing important aspects of local life. A panel organized by the Forum selects host communities from proposals submitted by coalitions of community groups. The Forum staff then assists selected communities in developing plans for the commission and residency, identifying local performers, and developing residency activities. Composers are invited to apply to the communities with ideas for turning their plans into realities. Local selection committees choose the composer with whom they wish to work, assuring matches that meet each community's needs.

Co-sponsored by the Forum and VocalEssence (founded as Plymouth Music Series), Essentially Choral provides a unique opportunity for emerging composers of all ages to develop their skills in writing for choral ensemble with accompaniment of up to fifteen instruments. Up to five composers are selected to have their works read by the Ensemble Singers, VocalEssence's 32-voice professional chorus, and professional orchestral musicians. The selected composers attend a rehearsal with the Ensemble Singers, a three-hour reading session with the vocalists and instrumentalists, and a mentoring session with internationally recognized composer Sven-David Sandstrom and VocalEssence Artistic Director Philip Brunelle.

Through Faith Partners residencies, composers collaborate with consortia of faith-based communities in the creation of new sacred music. Consortia are located in both rural and urban communities and include congregations of different faiths. Each composer creates several new works, some for individual congregations and some that are shared by the entire consortium. This unprecedented program seeks to reinvigorate sacred music and to reintroduce composers into religious settings where they have historically flourished. Participating congregations choose their resident composers from a pool of applicants, ensuring a happy marriage of style and outlook between the composers and their consortia. Since launching the program in the Upper Midwest in 1992, the Forum has continued to expand Faith Partners through its network of chapters.

Each year, the Visiting Composer Program underwrites a Minnesota residency of at least 8 weeks for two non-Minnesota composers. While in residence, the visiting fellow collaborates on a project with Minnesota performing, presenting, and/or community organizations.

Presents public readings of selected libretti, unstaged and on-book. American Opera Projects encourages the submission of original libretti, and adaptations of existing works of literature and drama.

The Dorset Colony provides a quiet working retreat for writers and other artists in a unique setting in southern Vermont. The philosophy of the Dorset Colony is to enable writers who need to set aside periods of time to work intensively on given projects, away from the distractions of everyday life, but at the same time total isolation from other people and a normal social environment is often just as disruptive.