Description
Grants for Americas Media Makers support projects in the humanities that explore stories, ideas, and beliefs that deepen our understanding of our lives and our world. The Division of Public Programs supports the development of humanities content and interactivity that excite, inform, and stir thoughtful reflection upon culture, identity, and history in creative and new ways. Grants for Americas Media Makers should encourage dialogue, discussion, and civic engagement, and they should foster learning among people of all ages. To that end, the Division of Public Programs urges applicants to consider more than one format for presenting humanities ideas to the public. NEH offers two categories of grants for media projects, Development Grants and Production Grants. Development grants enable media producers to collaborate with scholars to develop humanities content and format and to prepare programs for production. Development grants should culminate in the refinement of a projects humanities ideas, a script, or a design document for (or a prototype of) digital media components or projects, or a prototype for a digital media project together with a detailed plan for outreach and public engagement in collaboration with partner organizations. See application guidelines for Development Grants. Production grants support the preparation of a program for distribution. Applicants must submit a script for a radio or television program, or a prototype or storyboard for a digital media project, that demonstrates a solid command of the humanities ideas and scholarship related to a subject. The script for a radio or television program, or prototype or storyboard for a digital media project, must also show how the narrative elements, visual approach, and interactive design combine to present the projects humanities ideas. Applicants must have consulted with appropriate scholars about the project and obtained their commitment as advisers. Finally, applicants must have recruited the media team, including at a minimum the producer, director, writer, and, for a digital media project, the interactive designer. Applications may be submitted for any phase of a project. Applicants are not required to obtain a development grant before applying for a production grant. Applicants may not, however, submit multiple applications for the same project at the same deadline. An applicant must choose whether to apply for development or production of a particular project. If an application for a project is already under review, another application for the same project cannot be accepted. NEH encourages radio, television, and digital media projects that combine radio or television programs with complementary projects using emerging technologies, museum exhibitions, reading and discussion programs, and other formats that expand and enhance programs humanities content, deepen the audiences experience of the content, engage audiences in new ways, and expand the distribution of programs; advance the role of cultural repositories in online teaching, learning, and research for public audiences, teachers, students, and scholars; culminate in products such as DVDs, Web sites, games, virtual environments, streaming, video on demand, and podcasts, as well as user-generated content; simultaneously produce a broadcast program and interactive companion content in order to extend the educational experience of the programs audience, use resources efficiently, and keep the humanities ideas at the center of the project as the broadcast program and the interactivity are designed; engage public audiences interactively in exploring humanities ideas and questions by using new ways to contextualize, interpret, and distribute content; result in large-scale, collaborative programs featuring multiple formats; and build new programs around previously funded NEH projects using complementary formats that will add new dimensions to the original project and take advantage of new formats and technologies to reach audiences that were not served by the original project.