America's Media Makers Development Grants

Grants for America’s Media Makers support media projects that explore significant events, figures, or developments in the humanities and offer creative and new approaches to humanities content. America’s Media Makers projects promote active exploration and engagement for broad public audiences in history, literature, archaeology, art history, comparative religion, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities. NEH supports the development of humanities content and interactivity that excites, informs, and stirs thoughtful reflection and urges applicants to consider more than one format for presenting humanities ideas to the public. Grants for America’s Media Makers should enable greater audience engagement with the humanities, encourage dialogue and discussion, and foster discovery-based learning across the age spectrum. Development grants enable media producers to collaborate with scholars to develop the humanities content and format and to prepare programs for production. These grants cover a wide range of activities including, but not limited to, meetings and individual consultations with scholars, location and archival research, preliminary interviews, preparation of program scripts, designs for interactivity and digital distribution, and the creation of partnerships for outreach activities and public engagement with the humanities. The product of development grants should be the refinement of the humanities ideas, a script, or a design document for (or a prototype of) digital media components or projects. Development grant products may also result in a detailed plan for outreach and public engagement in collaboration with partner organizations. Before applying, applicants must have a solid command of the major humanities scholarship on the subject, have clarified the ideas the project will consider, and have consulted with a team of scholarly advisers to work out the intellectual issues the program will explore. Applicants must also have made preliminary decisions about the format and storyline and located essential materials for the program(s). Finally, they must have recruited the appropriate media professionals, especially the producer, writer, or interactive designer.