OVERVIEW: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is an iconic arts and humanities funder in the United States, supporting everything from general research grants for higher level scholars to scholarly communication, fellowships, IT projects, art history and conservation programs.
IP TAKE: With about $6.6 billion in assets, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a generous funder whose giving has most recently prioritized diversity, inclusivity and social justice in higher education. However, Mellon’s giving space is highly competitive. Indeed, some of its grants for the humanities and the performing are amongst the most prestigious, so expect to apply, potentially, more than once, but refine your proposal closely so that it accentuates how your work aligns with Mellon’s mission and focus areas. Ask expert colleagues from preeminent national organizations in your field to review your proposal’s language.
The foundation likes to give multi-year grants to leading performing arts organizations, which makes grants even more competitive for new grant seekers. Though Mellon is known for giving much of its funding to the more prominent and recognizable organizations with national visibility, they do, on occasion, give to smaller organizations.
The Mellon Foundation is massive, part of what makes it bureaucratic, which can make navigating Mellon’s programs difficult for first-time grant seekers. It’s not the most approachable or responsive, so maintain patience when contacting its staff. If invited to submit a full proposal, applicants “should be prepared to work closely with program staff in refining the proposal, often through multiple drafts.”
PROFILE: Founded in 1969, The Mellon Foundation is one of the most significant arts and humanities funders in the United States. It was created through the consolidation of two existing foundations—the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation—by the children of Andrew W. Mellon to honor their father, the banker, industrialist, politician and philanthropist who passed away in 1937. The foundation works to “build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Mellon’s grantmaking is conducted through four focus areas: Higher Learning, Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge and Humanities in Place. In addition to these focus areas, Mellon also funds several smaller initiatives, including The Monuments Project, Puerto Rico and Imagining Freedom.
In addition to its grant programs and initiatives, Mellon gave more than $200 million in both 2020 and 2021 to arts and humanities organizations for relief and recovery efforts in response to COVID-19. This includes support for smaller museums and cultural institutions in danger of permanent closure resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. The foundation also announced that it ended the year in 2020 by making $228.4 million in grants to 186 grantees “—the largest quarterly total in the Foundation’s 51-year history.”
In 2020, the foundation announced a shift in strategic direction, signifying a renewed emphasis on social justice and which represents a partial reinvention for the foundation. Going forward, it will prioritize social justice across all of its grantmaking.
Grants for Higher Education
The Mellon Foundation supports higher education through several grant and fellowship programs that focus mainly on teaching and learning in the humanities. Recent grantmaking has prioritized diversity, inclusivity and the sustainability of high-quality humanities education in the contemporary university. Grantmaking opportunities include the following:
Mellon’s Higher Learning program makes grants to support “inclusive humanities education and diverse learning environments—spaces where the ideas that enrich our understanding of a complex world are created and elevated,” and “sharper critical thinking to create a generation who can help steer a more engaged, multivocal, and truly democratic society.” Grantmaking prioritizes equity in higher learning and focuses on historically underserved populations, including nontraditional and incarcerated students.
The foundation’s Humanities for All Times is a $16 million initiative that supports humanities-based curricular and community projects at 12 liberal arts colleges across the US. Funded projects increase students’ engagement with humanities education and speak directly to students’ real-world commitments to social justice and civic and community engagement.
Currently, Mellon supports two multi-institutional initiatives. The Community College-Research University Partnerships seeks to smooth students’ transition from community college into four-year colleges, encourage faculty in two- and four-year institutions to better collaborate, and “give university faculty and doctoral students access to the knowledge about diverse and inclusive classroom practices that is prevalent in community colleges.” The Higher Education in Prison initiative works to provide higher education to incarcerated men and women in order to “disrupt the cycle of inequality and intergenerational poverty” and “restore the humanity and dignity of incarcerated people.” It also strives to remove the stigma surrounding students who have been incarcerated.
The foundation’s Just Futures program was established in 2020 to support “multidisciplinary, university-based teams across the US who are committed to racial justice and social equality.” Early grantmaking has gone to programs in which universities collaborate with community, local and/or regional stakeholders to create “new forms of knowledge, including curricula, public forums, museum exhibitions, publications, podcasts, and more,” with the broad goal of understanding “analyze the conditions required for socially just futures.”
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program seeks to remedy the problem of underrepresentation among higher education faculty, and to make it easier for students to engage with and learn from the perspectives of diverse faculty members. It also works to increase the numbers of Ph.D. students from underrepresented minority groups and to encourage Ph.D. students who are not from underrepresented groups to commit to diversity and representation. This program, however, will not fund students who intend to continue into medicine, law or other professional fields.
In addition to the New Directions Fellowships, the Mellon Foundation also funds a number of other Mellon-sponsored fellowships and institutional awards that are administered by organizations other than the foundation. Grantseekers can view the complete list on the foundation’s Regranting Programs page.
Mellon Foundation grants support institutions and organizations, not individuals. Initial inquiries must come from senior academic officers in order for funding from the Higher Learning program to be considered. Grantseekers are encouraged to review the complete Inquiries and Guidelines before inquiring about possible funding via the grantee portal here.
To learn more about the types of programs and organizations this funder supports, grantseekers can look through Mellon’s comprehensive Grants Database.
Grants for Arts and Culture
The Mellon Foundation conducts most of its arts grantmaking through its Arts and Culture program, which “celebrates the transcendent power of the arts to challenge, activate, and nourish the human spirit.” Grantmaking focuses on “exceptional creative practice, scholarship, and conservation of arts and culture, while nurturing a representative and robust arts and culture ecosystem.” Grantees tend to medium- to large-sized, highly acclaimed and well-established in their specific fields. Recent grantees include the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, New York City’s Ballet Hispanico and the Afro-Latin Jazz alliance of New York.
The Mellon Foundation also supports arts and culture through a series of Regranting Programs through which arts service organizations are able to re-grant funds to individual artists and arts practitioners in the areas of Creation and Production, Travel and Cultural Exchange, Professional Development and Other Areas. Within the Creation and Production regranting programs, Mellon either entirely funds or co-funds a number of multi-genre programs and initiatives. The foundation partners with Alternate Roots for its Artistic Assistance program, which provides project development support for Southern artists. Alongside the First Peoples Fund, Mellon funds Native artists, culture bearers and the organizations that support them. It also collaborates with Western Arts Alliance on the Advancing Indigenous Performance Program, which supports indigenous performing artists and touring networks. The MAP Fund “supports the development and production of original live performance projects that embody a spirit of deep inquiry, particularly those that question, disrupt, and complicate notions of social and cultural hierarchies.” The National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s Fund for the Arts program supports “Latinx artists, arts administrators, ensembles and organizations in the United States and Puerto Rico.” Mellon partners with Alternate Roots to fund the Partners in Action program, which supports collaboration between artists and non-arts partners to create work that furthers social justice. Finally, the National Performance Network’s Creation & Development Fund “supports the creation, development and mobility of new artistic work that advances racial and cultural justice and results in live experiential exchange between artists and community.”
The foundation’s Travel and Cultural Exchange regranting programs are not as numerous as its Creation and Production programs, but they touch on nearly as many genres. Opera America’s New Works Exploration Grants provide travel support to attend performances or workshops of new American opera works. Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International funds travel subsidies for U.S. artists invited to perform at “impactful” international festivals and events “across all performing arts disciplines including dance, music, theater, multidisciplinary work, and folk/traditional arts.” Theatre Communications Group’s Global Connections provides support for international artistic collaborations.
The Mellon Foundation’s Professional Development regranting programs include a partnership with artEquity to fund a National Facilitation Training program to “build meaningful discourse on issues of inclusion, equity, and the role of art makers.” The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures’ Intercultural Leadership Institute provides a “year-long intensive leadership program for artists, culture bearers, and other arts professionals.”
Finally, Mellon maintains funding for arts regranting via its Other Funding Opportunities for opportunities to support organizations and projects that do not fit into its other regranting programs. Through this subprogram the foundation supports ALIPH: International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, which works to preserve sites of “cultural heritage threatened or damaged by armed conflict.” Alongside the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the foundation supports African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which works to sustain “historic places that have been overlooked in American history and […] represent centuries of African American activism, achievement, and resilience.” The New York Community Trust’s Mosaic Network and Fund makes grants to support “African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA) arts groups in New York City.” The Nonprofit Finance Fund’s Zero-interest loan program is “an interest-free, no-fee revolving loan fund […] available to current or recent grantees of Mellon’s Arts and Cultural Heritage program.”
Outside of its extensive collection of regranting programs, Mellon also has a relatively new Art Museum Futures Fund that supports mid-sized art museums with emergency grants to help them navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and avoid permanent closures. Initial grantees through this fund include In New York City, grants have supported El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Grantees in other areas include San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum and the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, among others. The foundation established the Creatives Rebuild New York initiative in 2021 as a localized response to the effect of the pandemic on New York City’s art infrastructure. In its earliest stages, the program is described as a “guaranteed income program [that] will provide monthly, no-strings-attached payments to up to 2,400 artists with financial need.”
Separate from its COVID-19 response grantmaking, the Mellon Foundation established its Monuments Project in 2020. A five-year, quarter-billion-dollar project, this initiative aims “to recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.” Priorities of this new program include the funding of new monuments, memorials and public spaces; the contextualization of existing monuments and memorials through research and education; and the relocation of existing monuments and memorials to appropriate locations.
Generally, Mellon will not fund direct grants to individuals, capital and equipment costs, overhead, indirect costs, tuition, endowment management fees, one-off conferences, conservation treatment, exhibitions, K–12 arts education, or digitization of collections. Grantseekers are encouraged to review the complete Inquiries and Guidelines before inquiring about possible funding via the grantee portal here.
To learn more about the types of programs and organizations this funder supports, grantseekers can look through Mellon’s comprehensive Grants Database.
Grants for Music
A significant portion of Mellon’s arts funding is channeled to music organizations via the foundation’s Regranting Programs. The Creation and Production subprogram supports Chamber Music America’s Classical Commissioning Program, which makes grants to “professional U.S.-based presenters and ensembles whose programming includes Western European and/or non-Western classical and contemporary music.” Another intermediary, New Music USA’s Music Alive program, supports residencies for composers at orchestras of all sizes.
The foundation’s Travel and Cultural Exchange regranting provides a means for artists and arts organizations to expand their reach beyond their local communities. Opera America’s New Works Exploration Grants provide travel support to attend performances or workshops of new American operas. The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International funds travel subsidies for US artists invited to perform at “impactful” international festivals and events “across all performing arts disciplines including dance, music, theater, multidisciplinary work, and folk/traditional arts.” Theatre Communications Group’s Global Connections provides support for international artistic collaborations.
The Mellon Foundation’s Professional Development regranting programs for music include League of American Orchestras’ program for diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancies for American orchestras; Sphinx’s National Alliance for Audition Support, which is an “initiative to increase diversity in American orchestras […] by offering Black and Latinx musicians a customized combination of mentoring, audition preparation, financial support, and audition previews;” and South Arts’ Jazz Road, which supports “emerging and mid-career jazz artists from anywhere in the United States” with tour support, residencies, and programming support for presenters and venues.
Finally, under Mellon’s Other Funding Opportunities regranting category, Opera America’s Co-Production Loan Fund offers “no-interest, no-fee loans to professional company members to facilitate co-production partnerships with other companies.”
Grants for Writing
Mellon’s grantmaking for writing is conducted primarily through its Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives subprogram of the foundation’s Public Knowledge funding area. This program supports “efforts to digitize materials that deepen public understanding of the histories of people of color and other communities and populations whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or unattended.” Its grants build capacity for nonprofit academic presses and other publishing organizations. The foundation prioritizes the “hidden histories” of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other People of Color; Women; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Non-binary, and other Genderqueer people and communities; Immigrants; Displaced populations; Blind, Deaf, and Disabled people and communities; and Colonized, Disenfranchised, Enslaved, and Incarcerated people.
The foundation also has a series of Regranting Programs that distribute funds to service organizations that re-grant funds to publishing organizations and projects. One of these is a partnership with the Academy of American Poets’ Support for City and State Poets Laureate program that supports poet laureates at the local level.
Grants for Theater
Mellon supports theater predominately through its Arts and Culture Regranting Programs. It partners with New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, which supports the “creation and U.S. touring of artist-led, ensemble, devised projects.” Mellon funds programs with Alliance of Resident Theatres: Creative Space Grant Program, which seeks to “provide theatre companies with real estate opportunities to help them meet their creative needs.” The National New Play Network’s Rolling World Premieres provides support for multiple theaters “that choose to mount the same new play within a 12-month period, allowing the playwright to develop a new work with multiple creative teams in multiple communities.”
The Mellon Foundation’s Travel and Cultural Exchange regranting programs provide a means for artists and arts organizations to expand their reach beyond their local community. Opera America’s New Works Exploration Grants provide travel support to attend performances or workshops of new American opera works. Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International funds travel subsidies for U.S. artists invited to perform at “impactful” international festivals and events “across all performing arts disciplines including dance, music, theater, multidisciplinary work, and folk/traditional arts.” Theatre Communications Group’s Global Connections provides support for international artistic collaborations.
The foundation’s Professional Development regranting program partners with two separate organizations that support the theater community. Pangea World Theater’s National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation supports “training for the next generation of directors and ensemble leaders in an environment emphasizing non-Western techniques and social justice.” The Theatre Communications Group’s The Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Institute uses Mellon funding to support “peer-learning cohorts of not-for-profit professional theatres through a multi-year curriculum to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion at the personal, organizational, and field-wide levels.” Its Leadership U supports “professional development opportunities for emerging and mid-career leaders.”
Grants for Dance
The Mellon Foundation conducts most of its dance grantmaking through its Arts and Culture funding area’s Regranting Programs. Mellon’s Creation and Production regranting funds Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program, which provides affordable, high-quality rehearsal space for dance makers. New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project supports developing and touring dance projects.
The Mellon Foundation’s Travel and Cultural Exchange regranting program supports the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ Cultural Exchange Fund which makes grants for international travel for US presenters in music, dance, and theater. The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International funds travel subsidies for U.S. artists invited to perform at “impactful” international festivals and events “across all performing arts disciplines including dance, music, theater, multidisciplinary work, and folk/traditional arts.” Theatre Communications Group’s Global Connections provides support for international artistic collaborations.
The Professional Development regranting category for dance provides funding for South Arts’ Dance Touring Initiative. This program makes grants to “enhance the presentation of modern dance and contemporary ballet for presenters and audiences.”
Grants for Humanities Research
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports humanities research broadly through a number of its funding programs. Mellon’s Humanities in Place program seeks to support “a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where […] stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue.” Through its funding of “bold, innovative rethinking of past practice, and visionary new approaches,” grantmaking in this space works to “collectively understand, uplift, and celebrate more complete stories” about Americans, individually and collectively within society.
The foundation’s Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities focus area helps universities and organizations “respond to the economic, demographic, financial, and technological challenges affecting higher education, supporting initiatives designed to enhance the learning experience of both undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities, and fostering collaborations within and among institutions.” It supports research institutions and liberal arts colleges, as well as a number of fellowships. The New Directions Fellowships is managed by foundation staff, but Mellon also sponsors many fellowships that are managed by other groups.
The Arts and Cultural Heritage program “seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and conservation practices in the arts, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for these disciplines.” It does not offer grants directly, but it does distribute funds through service organizations that Regrant them.
The foundation’s Public Knowledge focus area provides grants to support the creation, preservation, and curation of the country’s cultural record; “the vast and ever-growing historical archive that helps us explore and better understand our intertwined humanity.” It works with “archives, presses, and a range of university, public, and other local, national, and global libraries” to “increase equitable access to deep knowledge.”
The Public Knowledge program also supports a number of Regranting Programs where the foundation distributes funds through service organizations that, in turn, distribute grants to other organizations. The Council on Library and Information Resources partners with Mellon for three programs: Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives, Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation, and Recordings at Risk. Mellon also either co-funds or entirely funds American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Extension Grants; National Endowment for the Humanities’ NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication; iSchool Inclusion Institute’s Undergraduate Summer Fellowships in iSchools; and The Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute’s Triangle SCI.
Grantseekers are encouraged to review the complete Inquiries and Guidelines before inquiring about possible funding via the grantee portal here. To learn more about the types of programs and organizations this funder supports, grantseekers can look through Mellon’s comprehensive Grants Database.
Grants for Criminal Justice
While it is not nearly as robust as the foundation’s other funding areas, Mellon makes grants to support criminal justice and prioritizes programs and initiatives that provide opportunities for education and higher learning for the country’s incarcerated population. The Higher Education in Prison initiative works to provide higher education to incarcerated men and women in order to “disrupt the cycle of inequality and intergenerational poverty” and “restore the humanity and dignity of incarcerated people.” It also strives to remove the stigma surrounding students who have been incarcerated. Another program, the Million Book Project, is a collaboration between the Mellon Foundation, Yale Law School, and the poet Dwayne Betts, author of “Felon: Poems.” It works to stock the libraries of 1,000 medium- and maximum-security prisons across the U.S. with curated collections of 500 books. Finally, Imagining Freedom is a $125 million initiative that works to reinvent the criminal justice system. The initiative supports “artists, writers, thinkers, humanists, memory workers, and storytellers whose lives have been impacted by the criminal legal system, as well as those working to bridge carceral and non-carceral spaces, foster connections between people, and bring together broader intellectual and imaginative communities.” To learn more about the types of programs and organizations this funder supports, grantseekers can look through Mellon’s comprehensive Grants Database.
Grants for Racial Justice and Indigenous Rights
Resulting from its announced shift in strategic direction, the Mellon Foundation’s social justice grantmaking represents a partial reinvention for the foundation. Going forward, it will prioritize social justice in all of its grantmaking. Mellon recently awarded a five-year $15 million grant to create the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The institute will conduct research into the areas of policy reform, K-12 education, social justice work, public health and criminal justice. The foundation also established the Monuments Project, which, according to an October 2020 article in Salon, will seek to “expand the very meaning of monuments themselves to include the word, the act and the unexpectedly preserved spaces that move us to awed silence.” Finally, as part of its Regranting Programs within the Arts and Culture focus area, Mellon partners with Alternate Roots to fund the Partners in Action program, which supports collaboration between artists and non-arts partners to create work that furthers social justice. To learn more about the types of programs and organizations this funder supports, grantseekers can look through Mellon’s comprehensive Grants Database.
Other Grantmaking Opportunities
Mellon runs a funding initiative for Puerto Rico which “supports higher education, museums, and grassroots organizations in their efforts to enrich and sustain Puerto Rico’s vibrant cultural and humanities ecosystem.” The initiative seeks to provide support and training to grassroots organizers in order to expand the public expression of art and cultural programming. It also works to retain local expertise by funding salaried positions for artists and other professionals, and to “share alternative narratives and elevate the cultural contributions of previously marginalized voices in Puerto Rico and broaden awareness of its artistic heritage beyond the region.” To learn more about the types of programs and organizations this funder supports, grantseekers can look through Mellon’s comprehensive Grants Database.
Important Grant Details:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation makes over $300 million in grants a year. Grants range anywhere from $25,000 to $15 million, while the foundation’s average grant size is about $150,000. This funder tends to give to U.S.-based universities, acclaimed arts and culture organizations and several “regranting” organizations that act as intermediaries between the foundation and its arts and culture recipients. While many of the foundation grantees have enjoyed ongoing, multi-year support, the foundation’s recent refocusing toward issues of social justice and inclusivity will likely bring many new grantees into its fold.
Mellon does not accept unsolicited proposals, but will respond to promising inquiries with an invitation to apply. Grantseekers should review general grantmaking policies as well as guidelines for individual program areas before submitting grant inquiries via the foundation’s grantee portal. For general inquiries, the foundation can be contacted via email or telephone at 212-838-8400.
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