The MAP Fund has announced its 2022 grantee cohort, awarding 88 grants totaling $2.6 million in support of live performing arts projects across the United States that are typically left out of traditional arts philanthropy.

Each recipient was awarded $30,000—$25,000 toward the proposed work and $5,000 in unrestricted funds. The grants will be used across a wide array of media and styles, including jazz, ghost stories, clowning, puppetry, musical theater, and folklorico to address socially challenging issues such as environmental justice, medical racism faced by Black women, myths about aging, cultural erasure, consumer culture, and vulture capitalism. Established in 1989, the fund receives support from the Doris Duke Charitable, Howard Gilman, Andrew W. Mellon, Jerome, Nathan Cummings, Mid-Atlantic Arts, and Wilhelm Family foundations as well as through government grants from New York City, New York State, and the federal government.

In 2021, MAP eliminated its grant application and selection process, inviting eligible past finalists to submit their name and project title, randomly selecting 55 projects to receive $25,000 in flexible funds. This year, the fund returned to an open call application, requiring no budgets and embracing a democratized selection process that engaged peer evaluation and randomized selection to identify its 2022 cohort.

“[M]any artists, determined to take a radically different approach to how they make or share their work as a result of the pandemic and other seismic political and cultural shifts, are now on an uncharted new path,” said MAP Fund executive director Moira Brennan, who is stepping down from her role after 20 years. “MAP’s support is essential to [artists], not only financially, but as a matter of encouragement to take those risks and to continue to follow their visions in a very new world.”

“We say yes to…artists who are working with ideas and practices that are frequently coded as risky, radical, or dangerous,” said MAP Fund director of grants and research Lauren Slone. “Not only do we need to keep supporting artists’ potential right now, we need to convince many more people and organizations to do it too.”

For a complete list of recipients, see the MAP Fund website.

(Photo credit: Ayodele-Nzinga/Courtesy of MAP Fund)