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Chicago Humanities Festival

Chicago, Illinois

Grants

2022 ( 2 months)
$2,500

The Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) promotes the public presentation of the arts and humanities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Through Fall and Spring festivals each year, CHF presents conversations, performances, and exhibitions that explore Chicago’s cultural, civic, and educational life and invite perspectives from across the nation. This professional development grant supports staff attendance at the InfoComm conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

2022 (3 years)
$150,000

The Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) promotes the public presentation of the arts and humanities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Through Fall and Spring festivals each year, CHF presents conversations, performances, and exhibitions that explore Chicago’s cultural, civic, and educational life and invite perspectives from across the nation. This award provides general operating support to the CHF as part of the Foundation’s Culture, Equity, and the Arts program.

2017 (5 years)
$300,000

The Chicago Humanities Festival promotes the exploration of the humanities -- including literature, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts -- through two annual festivals, year-round events, and a teacher-training writing program. The fall Chicago Humanities Festival is the organization’s signature event; it is a multi-week exploration of a theme featuring writers, scholars, musicians, historians, artists, performers, theologians, architects, and policy makers, featured at over 100 events held at locations all across the city. In 2015, over 50 percent of the presenters at the Festival’s events were people of color, LGBT individuals, or people with physical disabilities. To continue this trend, the Festival is committed to holding events in a wide array of neighborhoods and in venues that are accessible to those with disabilities. This award recommends renewed general operating support to the Chicago Humanities Festival.

2015 (1 year)
$25,000

The Chicago Humanities Festival promotes the exploration of humanities (literature, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts) through its year round programing and through its festival: the Chicago Humanities Festival in the Fall. The Fall Chicago Humanities Festival is the organization’s signature event; it is a multi-week exploration of a theme featuring writers, scholars, musicians, historians, artists, performers, theologians, architects, and policy makers. The Festival offers programs and resources to teachers and students, and its monthly views surpass 64,000. This award supports the Chicago Humanities Festival’s contribution to the 35th Anniversary Celebration of the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program, and will take place in the spring of 2016 as part of a series of events designed to to draw attention to Fellows and their work beyond the annual announcement cycle.

2014 (1 year 11 months)
$157,500

The Chicago Humanities Festival promotes the exploration of humanities (literature, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts) through its year round programing and through two festivals: the Chicago Humanities Festival in the Fall and Stages, Sights & Sounds, a festival for family and younger audiences, in the Spring. Programs are recorded and viewable on the organization’s website for free. The Festival offers programs and resources to teachers and students. The grant will be used for audience growth and diversification, commissioning new work, further developing education programs for younger children, and other activities related to general operations.

2011 (2 years 5 months)
$45,000

The Chicago Humanities Festival, founded in 1989, creates opportunities for people of all ages to support, enjoy and explore the humanities. It fulfills this mission through its annual festivals, the fall Chicago Humanities Festival and the spring Stages, Sights & Sounds, focused on children and families. This grant will support the development of an ongoing working relationship between the Chicago Humanities Festival and its counterpart in Edinburgh, the Imaginate Festival. The goal of this project is to establish a working relationship for the first time between the only two festivals in the world that seeks to provide humanities-based programming to children and families.

2011 (1 year)
$50,000

The Chicago Humanities Festival is a three-week program of lectures, panels, roundtables, and performances that exposes its annual audience of 50,000 people to some of the humanities’ foremost contemporary thinkers. This year’s theme technology provides an opportunity for some of the Foundation’s digital media and learning grantees to reach a new audience. This grant supports three programs: a Summer Institute for Teachers on new media literacies; a hub for information about the festival at the YOUmedia center at the Harold Washington Library; and an interactive session about the Quest to Learn school model and the soon-to-open new ChicagoQuest school.

2009 (5 years)
$250,000

In support of general operations (over five years).

2004 (2 years)
$100,000

In support of international programming (over two years).

2004 (5 years)
$170,000

In support of general operations (over five years).

2002 (2 years)
$250,000

In support of the Thinking Ahead capital campaign, further development of existing programs, restoration and production of Tan Manhattan, and a variety of new musical and teachers' initiatives (over two years).

2002 (2 years)
$100,000

In support of general operations (over two years).

2001 (1 year)
$75,000

To support the Children's Humanities Festival and the establishment of a proprietary box office.

2000 (1 year)
$50,000

To support the Children's Humanities Festival.

2000 (1 year)
$50,000

In support of general operations.

1998 (1 year)
$55,000

In support of general operations and to broadcast of portions of the festival.