NEA At A Glance

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest annual national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

The NEA is the largest annual national funder of the arts in the United States. While the NEA's budget ($155 million for FY 2009) represents less than one percent of total arts philanthropy in the U.S., NEA grants have a powerful multiplying effect, with each grant dollar typically generating up to seven times more money in matching grants.

Since 1965, the NEA has awarded more than 130,000 grants totaling more than $4 billion. With the mission to bring the arts to all Americans, the NEA has supported arts activities in every Congressional district in the United States, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases. Projects include artist residencies in schools, museum exhibitions, Internet initiatives, literary fellowships, national tours, international exchanges, theater festivals, design competitions, folk arts, historic preservation, and much more. The NEA has provided critical seed funds to arts organizations across the country. Organizations that received early support include Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina.

Since its inception, the NEA has provided leadership to create and sustain an agenda for arts education:

• NEA Direct Grants: The NEA Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth category provides direct grants for standards-based arts education programs;

• Partnerships: The NEA collaborates in federal, state, and public-private partnerships. For instance, the Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention provides additional support to the NEA national initiative Shakespeare in American Communities to provide disadvantaged youth with high-quality theater education opportunities and access to professional productions of works by Shakespeare;

• NEA Arts Education Leadership Initiatives: The NEA Education Leaders Institute convenes key decision makers to enhance the quality and quantity of arts education at the state level;

• Arts Education Research: NEA research on arts education includes Improving the Assessment of Student Learning in the Arts, the first nationwide effort to examine current practices in the assessment of K-12 student learning in the arts both in and out of the classroom.

The NEA administers the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program on behalf of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities (FCAH). Created by Congress in 1975, the Indemnity Program helps minimize the costs of insuring both domestic and international exhibitions, allowing museum attendees across the country to see important works of art from around the country and around the globe.

Through cooperative initiatives with other funders, the National Endowment for the Arts brings the benefit of international exchange to arts organizations, artists, and audiences nationwide. The NEA supports the following International Partnerships: USArtists International, U.S./ Japan Creative Artists' Program, ArtsLink Residencies, Open World Cultural Leaders Program, NEA International Literary Exchanges, The Big Read International, and projects that include the presentation of or collaboration with foreign artists in the U.S.

The NEA presents annual lifetime honors in three categories: NEA National Heritage Fellowships to master folk and traditional artists; NEA Jazz Master Fellowships to jazz musicians and advocates; and NEA Opera Honors to luminaries who have made extraordinary contributions to opera in the United States.

The NEA manages the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States Government. Established by Congress in 1984, and awarded annually by the President, National Medal of Arts recipients are selected based on their contributions to the creation, growth, and support of the arts in the United States. Each year, the Arts Endowment seeks nominations from individuals and organizations across the country. The National Council on the Arts, the Arts Endowment's presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed advisory body, reviews the nominations and provides recommendations to the president, who selects the recipients.

The NEA has produced landmark research reports that have provoked national debate on issues surrounding the arts and arts education. Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (2007) document declines in reading rates among children and adults. Other research, including Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005 (2008) and All America's a Stage (2008), looks at employment and economic trends in the arts industry. Additional studies on creativity and aging, civic engagement, and arts education highlight the social impact of the arts in America.

The NEA has created national initiatives that offer model programs of artistic merit and national reach:

• The Big Read, the literary component of American Masterpieces, was designed by the NEA to revitalize the role of reading in American culture. To date, the NEA has given more than 500 grants to support local Big Read projects. Each local project includes events, such as read-a-thons, book discussions, film screenings, and library and museum exhibits, aimed at avid and lapsed or reluctant readers alike.

• The NEA Jazz Masters Initiative celebrates this distinctly American musical tradition through the NEA Jazz Masters Award; NEA Jazz Masters Live, a series of multiple event engagements in selected communities, featuring NEA Jazz Masters; radio programming featuring NEA Jazz Masters; a compilation CD produced by Verve Music Group; educational resources through the NEA Jazz in the Schools program; and publications and reports.

• The NEA Arts Journalism Institutes allow journalists brief sabbaticals from their newsrooms and busy freelancing lives to focus on the arts themselves by attending performances, talking about the arts, and writing reviews under the tutelage of some of the country's top arts writers. The two-week institutes are offered in three disciplines at three of the country's leading universities: Columbia University hosts the classical music and opera institute, University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications hosts the theater and musical theater institute, and Duke University partners with the American Dance Festival to host the dance institute.

• Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experiencepreserves the stories and reflections of U.S. military personnel and their families.  Since 2004, the program has brought more than 60 writing workshops to troops at more than 30 domestic and overseas military installations.  An open call for writing submissions resulted in more than 1,200 submissions; in 2006, Random House published a critically acclaimed anthology of select writings. The program has inspired two award-winning documentaries, including one that was nominated for an Academy Award® and received two EMMY® Awards.  Most recently, the program has brought writing workshops to Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers and affiliated centers in the U.S. and abroad.

• Poetry Out Loud: National Poetry Recitation Contest is a partnership initiative with the Poetry Foundation and the State Arts Agencies thatencourages the study of great poetry by offering educational materials and a dynamic recitation competition to high schools across the country.  Now in its fourth year of national competition, nearly 300,000 students from more than 1,500 high schools nationwide participated in the 2008-2009 school year. 

• Shakespeare in American Communities, and its second phase, Shakespeare for a New Generation, is the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history, having brought new Shakespeare productions and special in-school programs to more than 2,000 communities, military and civilian, across all 50 states.

For more information, visit the National Endowment for the Arts Web site at www.arts.gov.

As of April 2009

National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20506

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