ICA New Work Mentor Grant Program

Hello!

Some cool progress on our student new work mentor grant program...

We've created a page for our project on our wiki:Click here!

Here you can follow along the progress of each student's work as well as see the list of artist mentors who have joined up with the project.

5 ICA Fast Forward video students ultimately submitted New Work Grant proposals. These proposals were sent to the review committee and were received very well. Each student scored highly, and each student was awarded the full requested amount. (Most of them requested only enough to feed their cast and crew on long shoot days, but one needed money for a permit/security to video tape on the commuter train.)

Initially I was going to have the students find professional artists in the Boston area to act as mentors, but what I did instead was to send out a request to those that I knew, inviting them to be on a roster of artists. The students can then look through this roster and choose the person they want to work with. The mentor's role is to check in with the student weekly, following the progress of the work through the student's blog.

The students received their acceptance letters last week. They were very excited. And this week they receive their funds and communicate with their prospective mentors. They are all already in producition mode for their films, so the mentoring will take place during the editing stage.

We'll keep you posted!

-JoE Douillette
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston