Pew Fellowship 25th Anniversary Video – Pew Center For Arts & Heritage

The Pew Fellowship offers artists a pretty incredible opportunity. The Fellowship awards a no-strings-attached $75,000 grant to twelve artists in the Philadelphia region each year. In it’s 25th year, the program has given away more than $17 million to 323 artists. Over that time the Pew Center has awarded 316 fellowships. Some of the Fellows have included a group of artists. The program has funded artists in nearly every discipline, including folk artists, writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, composers, dancers and choreographers, video animators, DJ’s, visual artists, and installation artists.

Over the last few months I’ve been working with the folks at Pew and producer, Jill Wolfe, to create this short documentary. It shows the impact that the Fellowship program has had on some of the artists who have received the Fellowship. We were able to interview a few artists (Lily Yeh and Hellmut Gottschild) from the very first year of the Fellowship. And we even interviewed a 2016 fellow, filmmaker and visual artist, Tiona McClodden, as well as several from the intervening years. This video also includes archival footage from a series of video profiles about Fellows produced in 2007-2008 by Glenn Holsten, a Pew Fellow himself. We also included many photographs of work created by Fellows over the years.

Many thanks to all who contributed to this project, especially Ellie Clark at Pew, who coordinated many of our interviews and tracked down a lot of the media included in the project. And special thanks to Megan Wendell at Pew, who managed the project and helped us get permission to use Fellow-created music in this video.

I really enjoyed working on this project and meeting so many accomplished artists in the Philadelphia area. For more about the Pew Fellowship program, visit the Pew 25th Anniversary Website.