New York City: The Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) has announced a new grant, in partnership with the Ford Foundation, aimed at supporting technological innovation and infrastructure in the performing arts. The new grants, totaling more than $4 million dollars over five years, will go to programs that aim to support technologies that promise to transform the performing arts field in the near future.

“By investing in organizations, we are helping to ensure that artists have access to development runways they need for technology innovations,” said Ashley Ferro-Murray, PhD, program director for the arts at Doris Duke Foundation, in a statement. “Infrastructure is an essential and often overlooked component of the artistic process. This includes production development, platform expansion and boundary defying accessibility. These new grants support our vision that artists should be at the forefront of designing ethical technological futures.”

The organizations and projects that have been selected to receive these funds include:

• Junebug Productions. To support The Future Is Us: AI and Afro-Futurism in Black Theater Management, a project to develop and implement an ethically sourced, culturally grounded AI platform to streamline administrative operations.
• Kinetic Light. To provide support for research and development of multisensory access tech systems, advancing the disability arts movement through the intersection of transformative performance and accessible technology.
• The Healing Project: New York Live Arts Inc. To support the Healing Project in their use of art, technology, and advocacy to collectively build a world centered around healing.
• Open Circle Theatre Inc. To support the development of VitaNova, an interactive, hybrid musical designed to be accessible from the ground up for disabled theatre artists and audiences.
• Producer Hub Inc. To support Marcus Roberts in the use of technology for developing and implementing fully accessible software and other tools for remote, real-time performance and recordings by jazz musicians.
• SOZO Impact & Relaxed Animals. To support EARTH.SPEAKS, an extended-reality platform for the Osage Nation and other Native communities integrating Indigenous language, history, and somatic practices into globally accessible, site-specific experiences.

 This new grant series builds on the work the Foundation has done at the intersection of performing arts and technology. Earlier this year, DDF announced a new initiative called Arts Make Technology (AMT), a multimillion-dollar investment, in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation that aims at building a cross-disciplinary infrastructure to empower performing artists to help shape technological change.

The Doris Duke Foundation works across three areas: Arts & Culture, Nature, and Health & Well-being. DDF focuses its support to the performing arts on contemporary dance, jazz and theatre artists, and the organizations that nurture, present and produce them.