PHILADELPHIA: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage has announced that it has awarded 40 grants and fellowships to nine Philadelphia-area cultural organizations and artists. The grants include $8.1 million for project funding and $900,000 in unrestricted funding for 12 artists.

“Our newest grants illustrate the arts’s contributions to understanding and reflecting on salient issues of the moment,” Pew Center executive director Paula Marincola said in a statement. “From contemplating experiences of living through a pandemic to interpreting multifaceted cultural identities, the funded projects and artists will offer programs and creative works that will be meaningful to a wide range of audiences and will invigorate civic and artistic life in the Philadelphia region.”

Philadelphia Theatre Company has received a project grant to produce the one-act musical Night Side Songs, which will address experiences of caretaking, illness, and mortality. Performances will be held both at the theatre and at caregiving sites in the region.

Theatre Horizon has also received a project grant for a new comedic musical by Amanda Morton, inspired by her life experiences as an adopted Korean American child raised by white parents.

People’s Light has received a grant for the development of the play The Woman Question by Suli Holum. The play examines gendered healthcare disparities and bodily autonomy through historical records from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Inis Nua Theatre Company was awarded a grant for Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s adaptation of John Millington Synge’s 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World. The adaptation maintains Synge’s satire of Irish society but centers a Nigerian asylum seeker in modern Dublin.

Pig Iron Theatre Company has received a grant for Franklin’s Key, written by Dan Rothenberg and Robert Quillen Camp with music by Rosie Langabeer. The physical theatre piece is set in a world where Ben Franklin’s inventions have been hidden underneath Philadelphia landmarks for centuries.

Additionally, the Pew Center has awarded $75,000 fellowships to multiple artists, including performance artist Vitche-Boul Ra.

A full list of grant awardees and fellows is available here.

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. It is dedicated to fostering a vibrant and diverse cultural community in Greater Philadelphia.