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In its 10th year of grant-making, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage has awarded a combined total of about $9.6 million in grant money to more than 50 local arts organizations. Grant recipients include 12 new Pew fellowships, 34 project grants, and three advancement grants.
Chris Madak, a contemporary musician and composer, and Rea Tajiri, a documentary and art filmmaker, are two of the $75,000 Pew fellowship winners. Afro-Cuban percussionist Pablo Batista’s “El Viaje (The Journey)” was awarded one of the 34 project grants, offering up to $300,000; and the Curtis Institute of Music received an advancement grant, “multiyear investments of up to $500,000,” for a new business curriculum designed for classical musicians.
Other local recipients of Pew grants this year include:
The Mann Center for the Performing Arts for “The Firebird: Spirit Rising,” a project combining South African music and puppetry with Russian folklore; Opera Philadelphia’s “Breaking the Waves” project, featuring composer-in-residence Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek; the Mural Arts Program’s “A Desert Home Companion,” an initiative that “will weave the stories of local Iraq War veterans and Iraqi refugees, cultural traditions, music and found sound into a participatory performance at Independence Mall… .”