How Two Documentary Filmmakers Became Their Own Independent Distributor

We are thrilled to honor these innovators and risk-takers who embody the spirit of entrepreneurship and bring the same extraordinary creativity to the office as they do to the studio. By experimenting and challenging conventional wisdom, these four winners have developed new approaches to age-old challenges in the arts field that can serve as models and inspiration for artists everywhere.

New Year. New You. New Mission. As the month of January reaches its blizzardy conclusion, let’s check in and see how those New Year’s resolutions are holding up. Well, maybe you haven’t exactly joined a gym or learned Spanish or finished reading Infinite Jest yet, but I’d like to slip in one more resolution for all you arts entrepreneurs out there to consider. Re-visit your mission statement. Or, you know, write one to begin with. Lots of artists and arts organizations seize the New Year as an opportunity to take stock of what’s working for them and what’s not. And so often, one thing that’s not working is their mission statement.

How Virtual Reality Could Solve the Arts’ Distribution Problem These are bleak times for America’s arts institutions. Lockouts and labor strife have become standard operating procedure, and that’s for the lucky ones. Those with shakier balance sheets are being felled by bankruptcy, many never to return.

(This is the fourth post in a series on Fractured Atlas’s capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.)

(This is the third post in a series on Fractured Atlas’s capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.) I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a reluctant decision maker. When I go out to eat at a restaurant, I often drive my dinner mates crazy by asking the wait staff for recommendations and then just ordering what I was thinking about getting anyway. In high school, I used to agonize over what now seem like trivial choices like what topic I should choose for my English papers. Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to the science of decision-making.

It's easy to get excited about the prospect of grant funding : grants carry with them a certain amount of prestige and the assurance that your work is (at least somewhat) funded, not to mention the fact that, if a funder is willing to give you a grant, they respect your work.

(This is the second post in a series on our capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.)

(Cross-posted at Huffington Post) A couple of weeks ago, a federal appeals court invalidated the Federal Communications Commission network neutrality or open internet rules. The rules prevented internet service providers from prioritizing certain applications or content, or blocking access to others. Though the court affirmed the FCC’s ability to regulate internet service providers and its option to redo the rules, the decision currently leaves both consumers and creators with no real regulatory protections.

A couple of years ago, we redesigned our fiscal sponsorship annual report to match up more closely with the format of the Cultural Data Project, an emerging data standard for cataloging financial, operational and programmatic information relating to arts nonprofits. In September 2012, we reaped the first fruits of that evolution in the form of “Discovering Fiscally Sponsored NYC Dancemakers,” a research report conducted for Dance/NYC that was the first study we know of to combine data from multiple fiscal sponsors to paint an inclusive picture of the dance community.