Dance/USA, the nationwide service group for dance, declares that the Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists (DFA) program will conclude following the top of its present and third spherical in October 2026. Created in 2018, the DFA program honors dance and movement-based artists with sustained practices in artwork for social change, and has awarded 86 Artist Fellows from throughout the US and its territories. The Spherical Three Artist Fellows had been introduced in November 2025, and this cohort would be the last one of many program. The DFA program has been made doable with beneficiant, multi-year help from the Doris Duke Basis, which is able to conclude on the finish of 2026. Dance/USA has been working in partnership with the Doris Duke Basis for almost 20 years, a collaboration that has fueled main subject initiatives, corresponding to Participating Dance Audiences (EDA) and DFA.
“The main focus of DFA is the artists, and that is still: celebrating the 86 excellent artists of this system who’ve dedicated their lives and work to social transformation by motion and dance. We’re deeply grateful to the artists, advisors, and directors who constructed DFA collectively. This work has proven how establishments can maintain energy in another way, how artists form programs, and what it takes to construct extra equitable types of help,” shared Haowen Wang, Dance/USA Director of Regranting.
One of many few regranting packages with an unrestricted monetary award obtainable to unbiased artists, the DFA program helps dance and movement-based artists from throughout the U.S. and its territories who work on the intersection of social and embodied practices. DFA acknowledges the wide range of the way wherein artists have interaction in social transformation by dance, which regularly don’t match into established fashions of arts funding. This consists of community-building and culture-bearing practices, therapeutic and storytelling practices, activism and representational justice practices, and extra.
Because the DFA program concludes, Dance/USA is utilizing this second to replicate on what DFA has constructed, and what it reveals about the way forward for artist-centered funding.
Since 2018, DFA has supplied greater than $2,727,000 of unrestricted funds on to artists, together with further assets. In Rounds Two and Three, DFA expanded past funding to help artist-led gatherings, offering paid time for collaboration, relaxation, and reflection. These areas had been self-directed by the artists, with monetary and administrative help from Dance/USA.
Over the course of Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists’ 9 years, over 190 artists and cultural employees have contributed their time, experience, and labor to this system’s evolution. DFA has advanced right into a field-recognized mannequin for equitable grantmaking that positions artists not solely as recipients of funding, however as co-designers of the buildings that help their work. Following the conclusion of DFA, Dance/USA will doc and share this system’s learnings and views with the broader arts and philanthropic sectors.
Study extra in regards to the Dance/USA Artist Fellows and their work.
