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The application for this program is currently closed. Future application opportunities will be announced in 2025.
Program Timeline
Application Opens
Applications must be submitted using Submittable, our online application platform, at https://jeromefdn.submittable.com
Information Session
Jerome staff presented information about the program, eligibility, application, and review process and criteria). This was followed by a Q&A with attendees. The recording of this session can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Rzro-O27vYo.
Live Office Hours
Bring your questions about the program and application to this session with Jerome staff. The hour-long session will be held Thursday, March 23, 4–5 pm Central Time. This session will be held on Zoom—mark your calendar and join using this link: https://bit.ly/mn-prod-23-qa. This session will not be recorded.
Deadline to contact Jerome staff with eligibility questions
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Applications must be submitted by Thursday, April 13, 2023 by 4 pm Central Time. Late applications are not accepted and any changes to an application may not be made after the deadline, as the review process begins immediately.
Notification of grant status
Funds paid to grantees
Workshop Videos
Best practices for creating a CV that helps a review panel understand your work and experiences.
Best practices for work sample submissions for this program, and how you might apply them to other grant programs.
Eleanor Savage has been with Jerome Foundation since 2007. She is active in the philanthropic and arts communities as an agitator for equitable practice. Eleanor is the Vice Chair on the Board of Directors for Grantmakers in the Arts. She is a media artist, an activist and has instigated, curated and produced many community-focused/artist-centered events in the Twin Cities: Naked Stages; Forbidden Fruit Radio; Vulva Riot; and Dyke Night at the Walker Art Center. She was previously the Associate Director of Event and Media Production at the Walker Art Center for sixteen years.
Eleanor's life-long commitment is promoting human rights as a guiding force and working actively as a white, gender-queer butch against racism and all the other intersecting oppressions.
Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Futurepoem and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies from Marble House Project, Storm King: Shandaken, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, she was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. Previously a senior editor of Triple Canopy, Lara currently teaches editing and publishing at the University of Minnesota. Most recently, she is coeditor of the artist monograph Darrel Ellis (Visual AIDS, 2021).
Photo by Venn Daniel.
Andrea Brown joined the Jerome Foundation in 2016. She came to the Jerome Foundation after five years at the Walker Art Center, where she was Associate Director of Strategic Marketing, and prior to that Associate Director of Digital Marketing and Marketing Manager. She worked in the New York office of the American Academy in Berlin before taking a 7-year detour into software at Marketing Bridge/Gage Marketing where she was Lead Account Supervisor.
Andrea has a B.A. in American Studies from Smith College.
Contact Andrea if you have questions about:
- Program guidelines and eligibility
- Technical help with applications
- Grantee reports and payments
The Program
In the most recent rounds, the MN Production program has received on average 35 applications per round.
Because not all applicants request the same amount of money, the number of grants the panels can support changes from one year to the next. In recent years, on average, panels award 4–5 grants each year, although this number can increase if successful applicants request less funding.
The Foundation has supported film projects since its founding in 1964. Please find information about Jerome-funded projects on our website: https://www.jeromefdn.org/past-grantees?grant_type=21&discipline=23
The grantee search can also filter by year and by Minnesota and/or New York City.
Eligibility
No, it is too early for you to apply. We hope that you will apply after completing and publicly screening your first film if you are then still eligible and interested in support.
Please first complete the eligibility quiz to make sure you eligible. Completing that quiz will clarify whether you meet our eligibility requirements. We also urge you to attend an information session. If you still have questions, please contact Jerome staff prior to applying.
Additionally, you should consider your production timeline. You will need to receive the funds and be in or begin production within the 18-month grant period from November 2023 through April 2025.
The Foundation supports directors working in multiple genres and, given our value around innovation and risk, applauds experimentation. The Foundation understands that you as an artist might change direction and interests in your film directing career. The challenge for panels in such a situation is being able to appreciate whether you have the skills and experience to move into a new form.
It is important for you in your application to “connect the dots,” helping the panel appreciate how the past work should inspire such confidence that you can move in new directions. You should direct the panel’s attention to relevant elements that would inspire this confidence in the Work Sample Context fields for each of the work samples. You should also explain what groundwork has been laid, what skills have been developed, and/or what motives impel you to undertake this new direction. We strongly encourage you to answer the optional question in the application, “If this project is different than your past projects, please share your plan for moving in this new direction.”
Yes, if you have established your primary residency in Minnesota, are still a resident at the application deadline and plan to continue to be a resident in Minnesota through April 2025.
Anyone who has an SSN (social security number) or an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) is eligible to apply—this includes DACA recipients and most types of VISA recipients. Individuals who do not have an SSN or an ITIN are not eligible to apply.
Only film directors may submit applications and receive funding from the Foundation. While grantees may use funds for productions costs, fees to actors, producers, writers and crew, etc., the applicant must be the film director/s. Actors, producers, writers and crew may not submit their own applications.
No. The program only supports independent work directed by the applicant. This type of work cannot be proposed as the basis of a project for which funding is requested.
No. This program’s exclusive focus is moving image media, which includes narrative, experimental, documentary, and animation.
Absolutely. That said, if your project has been rejected by two or more different panels, you are strongly advised to seek counsel from staff before applying with the same project yet again.
No. This is an individual artist grant program, and the application must come from you, not from an organization. If you are selected for a grant, funds must be distributed directly to you as an individual or directly to your single-proprietor LLC (if relevant).
Yes. However, you may not use funds from the Fellowship and from this project grant to support the same costs that are supported by that Fellowship.
The Application
No. Only work samples from projects that you directed may be submitted. If you do not have at least one completed project that you have directed, you are not yet eligible to apply for Jerome support.
While the online system does allow you to exceed written and video samples/narrative limits, you are strongly discouraged from doing so. We require panels to review only the amount of material captured in the suggested limit fields. Past panels have often interpreted excessive explanations as an indication of lack of focus. Additionally, in a discipline where the ability to present “the pitch” is an important professional skill, panels expect you to be able to offer condensed, precise presentation as part of your viable professional skills.
No. You may submit only one application per round, regardless of the number of projects you may be working on in the potential grant period. If you submit an application as an individual, you may not apply separately with a co-directing team, and no members of a co-directing team may be a part of more than one application. If you submit more than one application or if your name appears as an applicant in more than one application, all applications you submitted and in which you are named will be deemed ineligible.
If you apply in the MN Film, Video and Digital Production grant program, you may not also apply to the MN Artist Development program. Both applications will be deemed ineligible.
No. The review process begins immediately after the deadline.
No. Panels are asked to make their judgments based on the work samples and materials as provided in the application. We believe the benefit these letters may offer is outweighed by the burden they place on you to request them, references to write them, and staff or applicants to make sure they have been submitted.
Only if you are a finalist and discussed by the full panel. We ask busy professionals in the film, video and digital production arts world to serve as panelists and to review many applications before identifying those artists they want to consider finalists to be discussed at the full panel meeting. Asking them to provide written critiques of each individual applicant they review would impose an enormous burden on their time.
At the panel meeting, staff take notes during discussions and subsequently provide feedback to the finalists who are discussed (if you choose to make a follow-up appointment to receive that feedback).
We will not, however, be able to offer non-finalists feedback on their applications, beyond general trends of what made applications more or less competitive.
We know that the community of artists can be a small one, and we are diligent in ensuring that no one with a conflict of interest is part of the decision-making process on an application with whom they have professional or personal relationships. That said, professional relationships have been damaged when someone perceives that they have been rejected by a panel that included someone they thought was a supporter, even though that person was not allowed to be part of the decision-making process.
Past panelists have also expressed a preference to be protected from direct lobbying, mailings, personal appeals and/or receiving additional materials that can be sent their way when their role as a panelist is known. We have, therefore, made a conscious decision to protect the confidentiality of panelists—a decision affirmed by the Foundation’s Board of Directors. In assembling a panel, we work hard to capture the diversity of each field, in terms of identity, aesthetic expression, the many genres within a particular field, understanding of and relationship with early career artists, and geographic location.
At the same time, we want to ensure your confidence in the panels and their qualifications to consider artistic work. We therefore periodically post a comprehensive list of panelists we have used for past selection processes in multiple programs on our website, even while we do not link a specific panelist to a specific program or year. The panel composition changes annually, so knowing the identity of the panel in a given year does not provide insight into who will serve in the next round.
Many artists have told us that seeing the roster of the grantees, not of the panelists, is the most helpful information in deciding whether they wish to apply again in a future round. Past grantees may also be viewed on our website.
Panels are constructed to include leaders in the film, video and digital production field based in Minnesota as well as those working within the national sphere. All panels are constructed to ensure that no single race or ethnicity constitutes a majority or even half of the panel.
Budgets
Yes. Your fee is an allowable grant expense and can be included in the budget as part of the application. Please note that the budget will be evaluated by the panel to assess eligibility. Given that this is a production grant, the panel will expect to see these expenses in the budget in addition to your own fees. Panelists have responded negatively when the director fee is inordinate compared to the overall budget or when others involved are not being paid but the Director is.
Any budget, large or small, qualifies. You are expected to identify sources of funding, including secured and potential funders and the amounts they are expected to give for their project. For larger budget films, it is helpful to reference the funding levels for your past films as an indicator of your ability to secure the funds needed to produce the project.
Yes. It is rare that a Jerome grant will be able to cover all production costs. When assessing feasibility, panelists look for evidence that you have thought about where the remaining potential income will come from. We ask you to include both committed and pending income sources in the project budget you upload to the application (noting whether they are secured, pending, applied for but not yet confirmed, or yet to be requested). The application gives you the opportunity to explain your plan and any contingencies.
Panels recognize that Jerome funding can, on occasion, be the first confirmed funding for a project and can then help secure or leverage additional funds. Secured funding, therefore, is not required. At the same time, panels are charged with investing grant funds in viable projects that are likely to move forward. Providing a list of other secured and/or potential funds gives the panel an indication of how realistic your planning for the project has been and how likely the project is to move forward. Projects with no backup funding sources or with inflated or unrealistic expectations about other contributors are unlikely to fare well in the review process.