Boulder Artists

A Major Opportunity for Boulder Utah Artists

Boulder Artists Grant

The Boulder Artists Grants are two $2,500 unrestricted awards to support the work and growth of Boulder area artists. A committee of knowledgeable arts professionals from outside Boulder will select the grantees based on samples of the artists’ work, an evaluation of the artists’ intended use of the funds, and the potential for substantial benefit to the artist’s development.

With these awards, the Boulder Arts Council (BArtC) seeks to support Boulder artists who are poised to advance their work. The funds awarded may be spent on any resource (time, materials, tools, etc.) and/or project (travel, education, etc.) that will significantly benefit the grantees’ work.

Grantees will share their artistic work with the Boulder Community within 12 months of receipt of the award. This sharing may be in any form appropriate to the artist – a performance, a gallery show, a reading, a studio tour, workshop(s), etc., to be specified by the artist in their application.

Eligibility:

Applicants will be a Boulder resident with an address within area code 84716.
Applicants will be 18 or older at the time of the application deadline.
Applicants will be the sole originator of any work submitted.
Applicants will have a Social Security number or other Federal Tax ID and be responsible for all applicable federal and state taxes.
The grants are open to Boulder artists practicing in any medium, including visual, performing, and literary arts.

Selection Criteria:

The Boulder Artists Grant recipients will be chosen through an application process open to all Boulder residents and any artistic practice. All eligible applications will receive equal consideration. The grants are designed to support artists who will significantly benefit from additional financial resources to advance their work. The ideal candidates will be:

Artists with a clear and compelling vision for how the grant will advance their work and growth.
Artists with demonstrated dedication and commitment to growth in their art.
Artists with a well-considered proposal for sharing their work with the Boulder community.

Applications must be submitted by 11:59 pm on April 15th, 2025. No late applications will be accepted. BArtC will pre-screen applications for eligibility and completion only. Applicants are encouraged to contact the BArtC if they have questions about completing or filing their applications.

Following the application prescreen, the independent Selection Committee will review all eligible applications and make their final selections. The grant recipients will be announced publicly on June 7, 2025.

Application Requirements:
Applicants will be asked to provide the following information and to abide by the word count requirements.

BIO: 500 word maximum. Describe your art-related personal history: formative experiences, education, awards, and significant past or current projects.
Artist’s statement: 300 - 500 words. Please describe your artistic practice and the overarching concepts, goals, vision, or inquiries behind your work.
Description of intent: 300 - 500 words. Please describe your intended use of the funds should you receive this award. How would the award enable a significant advancement in your artistic practice and development?
How do you propose to share your work with the Boulder community?
Work samples: Applicants will submit five work samples created within the past five years. Sample may include any mix of video, audio, images, or other documentation.

Images must be submitted as jpg, jpeg, png, or gif, files. Images should be at least 1400 pixels on the longest side with a resolution of at least 75 dpi, 150 dpi preferred.
Audio samples must be submitted as mp3, .wav. or .aif files and may be no more than 3 minutes in length each.
Video samples must be submitted as MP4, AVI, WMV, MOV files and may be no more than 3 minutes in length each.
If you submit a sample with multiple performers, it should be easy to identify the applicant. The applicant must clearly identify themselves for the selection committee.
Written word samples should be submitted as PDF, doc, docx, txt or rtf files. Written word samples should total no more than 10,000 words across all samples.
Maximum File Sizes for any individual work sample is 10 MB excepting video samples. Video samples must not exceed 300MB each.

2025 Selection Committee

Lisa Bickmore, Utah Poet Laureate: Born in Dover, Delaware, Lisa Bickmore grew up living all over the United States and Japan. She is the author of three books of poems: Haste (Signature Books, 1994), flicker, which won the 2014 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press, and Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press, June 2017). Her poetry, scholarship, and video work have been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Tar River Poetry; Sugar House Review; SouthWord; Caketrain; Hunger Mountain Review; Terrain.org; Bite Size Poems project (Utah Arts Council); Quarterly West; The Moth; MappingSLC.org; Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets; and elsewhere. In 2015, her poem 'Eidolon' was awarded the Ballymaloe International Poetry Award. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Brigham Young University. She is Professor Emeritus of English at Salt Lake Community College, where she was the recipient of the SLCC Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 2006. At SLCC, she taught writing of all sorts, as well as publication studies, and is one of the founders of the SLCC Publication Center. As of 2019, she is the founder of the new nonprofit Lightscatter Press, which published its first book in April of 2021. In the summer of 2022, she was named Utah's Poet Laureate by Governor Spencer J. Cox.
Becky Bloom, Curator, Southern Utah Museum of Art: Rebecca Bloom is a scholar and curator who specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist material culture, and issues surrounding the intersection of religion and museums. Following four years of curatorial and educational work at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, she pursued graduate studies and research that engage materials across media, methods across disciplines, and subjects across geographical boundaries. While Rebecca’s work has taken her to the far corners of Asia—from the Himalayan monasteries of Ladakh to the seaside temples of Tamil Nadu to the city-center shrines of Japan—her achievements State-side have also been true adventures. In addition to coauthoring and contributing to several publications, she co-curated a multi-year exhibition of Buddhist art at the National Museum of Asian Art and collaborated on three digital humanities projects with a multi-disciplinary team from the University of Michigan. In addition to a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, Rebecca received her PhD from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan in Summer 2022. She is currently the Diane P. Stewart Director of Curatorial Affairs at Southern Utah Museum of Art in Cedar City, Utah.
Kenny Driggs, Helper City Performing Arts: Kenny Driggs is a designer and producer with over 15 years of professional experience producing art, music and entertainment with some of the biggest brands in the world. Now splitting time between Los Angeles, California and Helper, Utah, Kenny spent seven years as a designer and technical director for Walt Disney Creative Entertainment, before starting his own production company based out of Los Angeles. That company, West Coast Show Support, continues to design, fabricate and produce for some of the biggest names in live entertainment. In addition to the production studio in L.A., Kenny and his team operate a multimedia content creation studio in Helper, where they host hundreds of producing musicians every year. The studio operates alongside the historic Rio Theater to offer outstanding live music opportunities in Helper.

Please complete your application below. Note that, if you “save" an in-progress application you will be prompted to create an account that will allow you to recover and continue your work. If you complete your application in one sitting no account is required. In all cases, once your application is submitted you will receive an email confirmation.