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Minnesota Film, Video and Digital ARTIST DEVELOPMENT

THE PROGRAM

This is a new grant program for early-career directors who wish to enhance and develop their skills as a film/video/digital production director and will be based on the percentage of applications. Since this is the first round of the program, we do not have historical information to share.

This is a new program. The Foundation does not yet have information available on the number of applications this program will receive.

The Foundation has supported film projects since its founding in 1964. Please find information about Jerome-funded projects in the Past Grantees section of our website.

The grantee search can also filter by year and by Minnesota and/or New York City.

ELIGIBILITY

No. Applicants must have at least one directing credit on a prior film/video/digital production project.

No. Applicants may apply for one or the other of these opportunities, but not both.

Please first complete the eligibility questionnaire to make sure you eligible. Completing that questionnaire will clarify whether you meet our 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 within the 17-month grant period from November 11, 2021 through April 13, 2023.

You will also want to consider the Foundation’s program schedule. While applicants can apply next year for a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, project applications in this program will next open in 2023. Remembering that this project will be funded only once in the Artist Development program is now the optimal time for you to apply? Or will you have moved past our early career definition or be so close to completion of the project by then and therefore should apply now?

Whichever decision you make will not impact your ability to apply for a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, if you are then still eligible.

The Foundation supports directors working in multiple genres, and given our value around innovation and risk, applauds experimentation. The Foundation understands that as an early career filmmaker you may want to expand skills into new genres and forms. In your application you should direct the panel’s attention to relevant elements that would inspire confidence moving into a new form in the Work Sample Context fields for each of the work samples. You should also explain your motivation behind moving towards a new genre, what skills you may currently have and how you plan to continue to develop these skills through this grant when you answer the application question, “What are the artistic and/or professional development goals and objectives you want to explore with this grant and how will these activities directly connect to the work on your project?”

The Foundation’s goal is to serve a spectrum of artists typically in their 2nd to 10th post-student (if applicable) year of creative practice as a director. We want to serve directors with some track record of creating and presenting full work (not beginning directors), and who are NOT at a point in their careers where they receive consistent development and production opportunities and significant recognition, awards, and acclaim (not mid-career or established artists).

The Foundation in specific circumstances is intentionally flexible to a degree at both ends of this time range. Some directors may experience enormous success and move past early career status well before their 5th year or 10th year. The numbers of opportunities afforded to other directors may differ significantly based on discipline, race/ethnicity, class, gender, physical ability and geography among other factors. Consequently, some directors may be past their 10th year and still be on the spectrum of early career status. If you have received significant support in the past or if you are past your 10th year, you should consult with Lann Briel before April 1 to verify your eligibility before you submit an application.

Yes, but please pay special attention to the following factors in order to make sure the application is eligible.

  • The co-directors must have completed at least one project together as a directing team and must be sharing the responsibility of directing the proposed project. The directing team that directed all of the work samples must be identical in its entirety to those named as members of the directing team in the application. Projects completed individually or co-directed with anyone not applying as part of the co-directing team are not eligible work samples and will not be considered. 
  • Each member of a co-directing team must meet all eligibility requirements in these guidelines. Other individuals associated with the film (in producing, writing, crewing, or acting but not in co-directing) will not be recognized as a co-director.

This grant prioritizes the artistic advancement of early career filmmakers and should not be viewed as supplemental production funding. If you are applying as a co-directing team both co-directors should be at similar career stages and looking to advance their film and video skills through this program.

No, with two exceptions.

All three residency requirements must be met by your current residency—not by your family’s place of residence or your birthplace (e.g., if your family lives in Minnesota or you were born here, but now are a resident of another state, you may not apply).

  1. you filed your federal taxes for 2020 as a Minnesota resident,
  2. you still reside in Minnesota at the time of application and
  3. you will still be residing in Minnesota when the grant is awarded in October 2021.

All applicants who do not meet all three of these conditions will be deemed ineligible. However, there are two exceptions:

  • EXCEPTION #1: COVID-related temporary relocation (for artists who were Minnesota residents in 2019, relocated in 2020 because of COVID but intend to return to Minnesota in 2021): If you filed your federal taxes for 2019 as a Minnesota resident, have spent most of 2020 away from Minnesota because of COVID-related circumstances (whether economic or medical) but plan to re-establish residence in Minnesota before July 1, 2021, you may apply.
  • EXCEPTION #2: Exceptions for artists who are relocating to Minnesota from prior established residence in New York City. If you filed federal taxes for 2019 as a NYC resident but will not file federal taxes for 2020 as a NYC resident (apart from those citing the COVID exception above) you are eligible to apply, if and only if, you have moved or will move to Minnesota from New York City. If you are planning to move to Minnesota from New York City before October 2021, you should apply in the Minnesota program and not in the New York City program. Please note the grant guidelines for the Minnesota program are different than those for the NYC program.

Yes, if you have established your primary residency in the state of Minnesota, are still a resident at the application deadline and plan to continue to be a resident in MN through 2023.

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 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.

However, you may submit music videos, studio, commercial, industrial and work-for-hire as a work sample if and only if you had full creative control over the projects.

No. This program’s exclusive focus is moving image media, which includes narrative, experimental, documentary, animation, and a hybrid use these forms.

Yes. The panels have shown a great willingness to take on controversial subject matter and recommend grants to the Foundation's Board. 

Yes, non-traditional venues are not an issue for the Foundation—in addition to work screened in movie theaters, festivals or broadcast channels, ranging from commercial to public access, the Foundation also supports online distribution/presentation. The Foundation does not support media work that is part of an installation/exhibition, unless the work is designed to be screened, broadcast or distributed as a film, video or digital production.

No. The Artist Development program will only provide one grant per project, however, you can apply to the Production grant program in a future round with the same project provided reporting requirements are complete. You may apply for one or the other of these opportunities, but not both, within the same program year.

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).

No. If you are a current or past Jerome Hill Artist Fellow you are ineligible to apply to this program. The Artist Development program is for very early career filmmakers who want to advance their skills through artistic and professional development opportunities. Jerome Hill Artist Fellows are further along in their careers and beyond this grant.

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.

The Foundation does not support first time filmmakers and prioritizes support for those filmmakers who demonstrate the capacity to complete at least one project.

Resumes are a critical component of the evaluation. Resumes that are incomplete or confusing can lead the panel to reject your application, even before reviewing other parts of the application and your work samples. For specific information on what the resume must contain, see the “Application Criteria” page for details and links to samples.

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. You may not submit an application for a Production Grant and an application for an Artist Development grant.  If you submit an application as an individual, you cannot apply separately with a co-directing team, and no members of a co-directing team 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 the applications you submitted and in which you are named 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 applicants 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 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 and might compromise the quality of the panelists willing to serve.

At the panel meeting, staff take notes during discussions and subsequently provide feedback to the finalists who are discussed. You can indicate in the application whether you would like to receive that feedback if you are a finalist.

We will not, however, be able to offer non-finalists feedback on their applications, beyond a general sense of the meeting itself and general trends of what made applications more or less competitive. If you are not selected for a grant, your rejection letter will specify whether you were a finalist or whether you were removed from consideration before the full panel met.

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 participates in the discussion or 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 discussion or 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, which is comprised of a majority of artists, women, and people of color. 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, 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

This grant prioritizes the artistic advancement of early career filmmakers and should not be considered as supplemental production funding. Budgets submitted with your application need to outline how you plan to use the funds to advance your skills as a director. Artist development activities can inform and enhance your project however expenses are not intended solely for production. Expenses included in your budget must tie to artist development and outline what you intend to do to advance your skills. Expenses can cover anything related to your project as long as they tie to your artistic development as a director.

GRANT PAYMENTS

No. Eligible costs must be incurred after the grant is awarded.

If you receive a grant, you will be required to sign a grant agreement with the Foundation and (if you receive less than you requested) submit a revised plan outlining intended use of grant funds before money can be released. We anticipate first funds will be distributed no earlier than November 11, 2021, and all eligible costs must be incurred to be performed and paid after that date. Payments are made through direct deposit. Typically, the time necessary to process the contract and establish a direct deposit account takes a minimum of three weeks. The Jerome Foundation’s payment dates are the third Mondays of each month, excepting April when no payments are made. For the sake of planning, applicants should not expect to receive funds before November 11, 2021 at the earliest.

Yes, these grants are considered taxable income by the Internal Revenue Service.   In addition, grantee names and city of residence are required to be listed in the Jerome Foundation’s annual tax return, which is a public document and is posted on the Foundation’s website. If grantees prefer, a P.O. Box may be provided in addition to a home address for the purposes of public reporting.

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