It Starts Here
2022 Conference Blog
Jasmine Liu
Applying for things is a murky process, especially for the applicant who doesn’t have many preexisting ties to the organization they’re sending an application to. Many of us have spent hours on end finely crafting application essays and soliciting recommendation letters only to never hear back from those reading them, and these experiences can leave us with the impression that the application process is an incomprehensible black box.
I kicked off the morning of day one of the conference at the breakout session “It Starts Here: Program Design for Equity, Disability Justice, and Intersectional Identity Politics,” where a team of program officers at DanceUSA discussed how they went about redesigning the application process for their Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists (DFA) program. Revamping the program while guided by principles of justice, equity, accountability, and inclusion, they implemented a data-driven approach to better understand who their program was serving and who was being excluded.
“How do we as institutions learn to embrace the disruptive vision of artists?” director of regranting Haowen Wang asked. “How do we curb our impulses to canonize language, definition, and structure?”
They realized that important to restructuring their program to prioritize justice and equity would be rethinking their application. Inherited language describing the program, they decided, reaffirmed institutional oppression and treated artists as outsiders. Moreover, they identified that some language could be intimidating to artists who did not have institutional backing or company affiliation, something that conflicted with their goals. Instead of judging the quality of application writing as a decisive criteria for whether a fellow would be chosen, they deemphasized the value they placed on individual essays, instead evaluating the artist holistically. For similar reasons, they deprioritized work samples on their own and instead considered them in the context of the whole portrait of the artist’s practice.
They also discussed other important accessibility accommodations programs can make, such as translation services. They also highlighted that disability is a source of artistry and creativity, and that programs must be aware of when they champion certain disabled artists while continuing to marginalize others.
I was struck by the observation that artist and choreographer Laurel Lawson offered: that the structural imbalance is that the “includer” — for instance, a program officer — has all the power to start with, and the “includee” — for instance, an artist — knows they can become the “excludee” very fast, at the includer’s discretion.
The DFA program’s redesign provides a good model for how organizations can look to mitigate this imbalance even as it remains in play.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jasmine Liu is a staff write for Hyperallergic.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The 2022 GIA Annual Conference begins on Thursday, October 6 and runs through Wednesday, October 12. In the meantime, get familiar with our virtual portal and check out the in-person sessions!
You can follow the convening and join the conversation using the hashtags #ConvergeTransform and #GIArts2022 on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And, don’t forget to visit the Conference Blog for stories and reporting from the in-person and virtual conference tracks throughout the week.
