The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York City has announced grants totaling $1.3 million to nine national arts organizations.

Awarded through DDCF's Fund for National Projects, the grants are designed to strengthen the national infrastructure of the professional nonprofit dance, jazz, presenting, and theatre fields and improve conditions for performing artists across the country. Initiatives receiving support range from research on the health of professional nonprofit arts groups to special convenings for an entire professional nonprofit performing arts field.

The 2013 National Projects grant recipients include Chamber Music America, which will use its grant to conduct an eighteen-month research project designed to determine mechanisms that can be created and codified to alleviate the administrative burdens faced by jazz musicians and presenters nationwide; EmcArts Inc., which will launch a pilot training program with sixty arts leaders in three communities and provide vital "adaptive assistance" to peer organizations; and Fractured Atlas, to further develop Artful.ly, its free organizational management software program, and integrate it with the organization's fiscal sponsorship program. In addition, American Dance Abroad, with Fractured Atlas acting as its fiscal sponsor, will receive funding to implement four interconnected projects designed to expand international export opportunities for American dance artists and companies.

Other recipients include the Latino Theater Company, which will use its grant to launch a National Latina/o Theater Convening in the spring of 2014; QCC-The Center For LGBT Art & Culture, which will organize and conduct an August 2015 Queer Arts Summit in San Francisco; the Theatre Communications Group, which is working to study, record, and disseminate the history and progress of racial and ethnic diversity within the theater field; the Theatre Development Fund, for a project that seeks to deepen the impact of new theatrical work on individuals and communities; and Youth Speaks, which will work in partnership with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to convene artists, commissioners, presenters, and funders to address the emerging aesthetic, demographic, and political trends in the field of theater and performance for the hip hop and post-hip hop generations.

"This year's DDCF Fund for National Projects grantees support and represent an exciting array of activities from software development to national convenings benefiting the dance, jazz and theatre communities," said DDCF program director for the arts Ben Cameron. "We are honored to support these organizations and look forward to the impact these projects will have on their respective fields."