The Doris Duke Artist Awards give individual artists $525,000 in unrestricted support — money that Ashley Ferro-Murray, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Foundation, says can go toward housing security, deferred medical care or debt. Awardees can also access a $25,000 retirement-savings incentive, networking support with other artists, and tax- and financial-planning resources.

Ferro-Murray, a dancer, choreographer and curator who completed a 2016 PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on the intersections of choreography, media and technology, has built a multi-pronged funding strategy at the foundation. It targets individual artists as well as performing arts institutions and advocates, and seeks synergy with other organizations and industries.

Her guiding conviction: "no one knows better than artists what they need." It is based, she says, on her own personal experience as a working artist.

From the studio to the grantmaking table

"I joined the Doris Duke Foundation as a dancer, choreographer, and curator, and rely on the skills that dancing taught me: discipline, follow-through, and resilience," Ferro-Murray told Dance Magazine. She spent a decade in her 20s trying to work out how to make a living as an artist.

In her 30s she served as curator and producer of dance and theater commissions at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There she worked closely with artists and companies including Maria Hassabi, Kinetic Light, jaamil olawale kosoko, Su Wen-Chi and Sage Whitson, producing projects that, in her words, "pushed our expectations of what dance looks and feels like."

That experience also gave her a grant-seeker's view of the field. "Artists don't have reliable options for employment protection, health insurance, retirement accounts, and the list goes on," she said. The grant system itself drew her scrutiny: it can push artists into applying year after year, with only a very small percentage receiving funding — a laborious process that pulls artists away from their craft and often fails to deliver what they actually need.

"We know that artists are creative and find ways to make do, but this also means that the dance world has long relied on a scarcity mentality," Ferro-Murray said. She wants to locate and fund resilient models for the future alongside legacy models that center and value artists' labor. One foundation tactic: combining grantmaking capacity with other resources, such as marketing and communications skills.

Dance and technology, reconnected

One of her first tasks at the foundation was designing a new strategy area focused on technology and the performing arts. She rejects the received history that casts dance and technology as opposites. During the industrial revolution, much dancing mimicked machine movement — the Tiller Girls, for example — while Isadora Duncan used choreography to reassert the emotional effort and changing rhythms of humans.

That antagonistic narrative, Ferro-Murray argues, comes from a white Western context. Afrofuturism, cyberfeminism and Disability activism offer counternarratives that use contemporary technology to liberate bodies. She cites John Bernd, who made Surviving Love and Death to take control of the impact early AIDS medicine had on his body, and contemporary choreographers Raja Feather Kelly and Nile Harris for their treatment of digital culture. Her doctoral research informs a particular interest in projects that highlight dance's importance in the development of more equitable technology.

Partnerships over going it alone

"Right now, I'm most excited about our grant programs that place trust in artists," Ferro-Murray said of the Artist Awards, where "unrestricted" means artists decide how to spend the money — including building a social safety net.

The foundation is also looking outward. "I'm also excited the Doris Duke Foundation knows we can't do everything on our own," she said. Its new endeavor Artists Make Technology, run with the Mozilla Foundation and in partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation, extends the strategy of pairing the foundation's grantmaking with outside expertise.

For a field she describes as long accustomed to scarcity, the bet is that unrestricted cash, retirement incentives and cross-sector partnerships can fund artists on their own terms.