After a successful 18-year history, why has PFA changed its selection process?
• Artists working in any discipline or across multiple disciplines can be invited to apply in any given year. • The impact of the monetary award to each fellow will be significantly enhanced by robust professional- and career-development support. • The new process will provide a more thoughtful and thorough cumulative assessment of the applicants’ work at each step of the process, ultimately leading to better-informed decision making in the selection of fellows. • Prior to these changes, in order to give each of up to 400 applications its due, PFA focused a disproportionate amount of staff expertise and resources on administering the application process. With this change, PFA is able to apply its resources and its staff expertise directly to providing robust professional-development support to the fellows in ways that respond to their individual needs, which adds considerable value to the substantial cash award.
Before PFA introduced the nomination process, each year as many as 400 artists would compete for 12 fellowships. While it was encouraging to receive so many applications, PFA focused a disproportionate amount of time and financial resources on simply administering the large volume of incoming applications. Now, resources formerly expended on administration can now be invested directly in the Fellows in the form of robust professional-development support that responds to each fellow’s individual needs. An expanded answer to this question can be found on the Program Overview page.
