Did you know that the VANS Board of Directors did a program review and suggested that a better emerging artist program could be created by combining elements of the Mentorship Program and the (former) New Grad Program? So we applied for and received the Marian Hebb Research Grant from the Access Copyright Foundation to hire researchers to find out what emerging artists want to see in a program. For six months, primary researcher Eryn Foster and research assistant Pamela Juarez surveyed tons of emerging artists, conducted long interviews with emerging artists and the people and organizations that run programming for them, and they created a report detailing their findings. We hope that this report will lead to the development of a new emerging artist training program that is more accessible, and responsive to artists’ needs.

Thank you to the Access Copyright Foundation for their support! We are so grateful.