Artists

Josh Koral
Performing Arts Workshop teaching artists Chin Chin Hsu (r) and Dazaun Soleyn (l) dance at the Geneva Powerhouse in San Francisco. The Performing Arts Program provided a capital grant to the Workshop that helped them secure a long-term lease on the facility from the City of San Francisco.

Overview

The strength of the arts sector is fundamentally dependent on the strength of its artists. Changing business models, technologies, and audience behaviors mean that artists often have less financial support from nonprofit organizations than they once did. While artists have long struggled to be appropriately supported, recognized, and compensated for their work, they need more than recognition and pay to thrive. Our Artists grantmaking strategy provides artists with the support they need to evolve business models; seize opportunities presented by the changing ways art is created, distributed, and financed; and embrace collaboration across artistic boundaries and sectors.

Goal

Artists throughout the region have equitable access to services, networks, and supports that are relevant and responsive to their priorities.

Our Team

Emiko Ono
Emiko Ono 
Program Director
Amanda Artru 
Performing Arts Fellow
Jaime Cortez 
Program Officer
Adam Fong 
Program Officer
 @adamcfong
Nathan Jae-Sun Large
Nathan Jae-Sun Large 
Program Associate
Jessica Mele
Jessica Mele 
Program Officer
 @JessCMele
Leeanne Oue 
Grants Officer
Pooja Kadakia Raval 
Senior Counsel
Heath Wickline
Heath Wickline 
Deputy Director of Communications

Learn More

Support for artists is provided through three avenues intended to improve artists’ ability to develop and share their work, engage with audiences, and thrive in the Bay Area.

Essential services. Services available to support artists have grown dramatically in the past decade, but are still not available widely enough. Our grantmaking seeks to strategically expand critical and relevant artist services (such as discipline- and function-specific capacity building, technical services, fiscal sponsorship, legal aid, and event insurance), both to ensure the availability of existing services in outlying parts of the region and support new approaches to artist services.

Formal and informal artists’ networks. Networks, alongside established organizations, provide critical support for artists. They foster social connections and provide critical support to artists, particularly for those living far from the region’s core, or those whose processes and methods are undervalued or not widely understood by existing programs and institutions. We support existing and new artist networks that cultivate communities of practice, strengthen emerging fields, and facilitate learning and development.

Financial support for artists. We work with intermediary organizations to provide modest support to a small number of artists’ projects.

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