Make a Nomination

To honor and preserve our nation's diverse cultural heritage, the National Endowment for the Arts annually awards NEA National Heritage Fellowships to master folk and traditional artists. These fellowships recognize lifetime achievement, artistic excellence, and contributions to our nation's traditional arts heritage.

Nominees must be worthy of national recognition and have a record of continuing artistic accomplishment. They must be actively participating in their art form, either as practitioners or as teachers. Fellows are selected according to criteria of artistic excellence, significance within the particular artistic tradition, and contributions to living cultural heritage.

In addition, one NEA National Heritage Fellowship will be given to an individual who has made major contributions to the excellence, vitality, and public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts. The nominee should be worthy of national recognition and must be actively engaged in preserving the folk and traditional arts. Named after the influential advocate, educator, and producer of the folk and traditional arts, Bess Lomax Hawes, this award recognizes:

• An artist whose contributions, primarily through teaching, advocacy, organizing, and preserving important repertoires, have greatly benefited their artistic tradition.
• An individual such as a producer or advocate whose efforts have significantly increased opportunities for and public visibility of traditional arts and artists.

The NEA National Heritage fellowship category is not open to application. Fellowships are awarded to living individuals on the basis of nominations from the public. Nominations may be for individuals or for a group of individuals (e.g., a duo). The recipients must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States. Posthumous nominations will not be considered.

Each award is $25,000 and may be received once in a lifetime. No payment will be made to the estate or heirs of a deceased recipient.

How to Submit a Nomination

Nominations are accepted by using our online nomination form. Please see the description of a complete nomination package below. Individuals may be nominated specifically for the Bess Lomax Hawes NEA National Heritage Fellowship, and all nominees will be considered for this award.

An individual may submit one or more nomination(s) in each round of the NEA National Heritage Fellowships and no one may nominate him/herself.

A complete package should not exceed 20 pages in length. Excess pages will be removed and not be reviewed.  Each nomination should have a separate nomination package.

We encourage you to attach and submit your documents as PDF (portable document format) files electronically.  Using PDFs allows you to preserve the formatting of your documents so they can be presented to reviewers exactly as you intend.  If you don’t already have software to convert files to PDF, there are many low-cost and free software packages that can do this.  However, you have the option of submitting these items in hard copy directly to the Arts Endowment.

With the exception of Attachment 1, do not create PDFs of your electronic documents by scanning.  In the past, some nominators have printed their electronic documents and then scanned them, saving the scan in PDF format. PDFs created this way are much larger, and of lower quality, than PDFs created by the methods we recommend. Do not embed non-printable media files (video and/or sound) in your PDF documents. Static images (e.g., pictures) are acceptable. Please do not enable any document security settings or password protect any PDF file you submit to us.

Submitting Electronic Nomination Material

The following attachments may be attached to the online nomination form to comprise a complete nomination package.  Each attachment file size limit is 1 MB (megabytes). 

Attachment 1: A statement/letter that details the reasons that the nominee(s) should receive a NEA National Heritage Fellowship. Describe the nominee's contributions to his or her particular artistic tradition and explain why this individual or group deserves national recognition.

Attachment 2:  Work Sample Index

For each work sample that you are mailing for your nomination, provide the information below as relevant to your nomination:

• A letter designation. Start with "A." List your samples in the order in which you want them reviewed (e.g., A, B, C). Make sure that the letter on the Work Sample Index corresponds to the letter on the sample work itself. Each different CD, DVD-R, DVD-ROM, etc., should be considered one work sample. For digital images on a CD, each set (not each image) should be considered one sample; follow your Work Sample Index with a script that identifies each image separately.
• Format, e.g., CD (audio), CD (data), DVD-R, DVD-ROM, printed material.
• Identification of the artist(s) featured (e.g., African-American gentleman wearing black and white striped shirt on stage).
• Title or description of the work or activity.

Any special instructions for reviewing the sample, and, where relevant, specific selections on that sample. Include, as relevant:

• The relevant track or chapter numbers, in priority order.
• Real elapsed time or cue information indicating the start of different selections, in priority order. Note your first cue as 0:00. If your second selection starts five minutes later, note the start of that as 5:00, etc.
• For Web sites, the URLs for the pages to be shown, as well as any necessary information on required plug-ins or the navigation path.
• Any other information necessary to guide reviewers easily to the selections that you want.

Attachment 3:  List of a maximum of five support letters that you will be mailing directly to the Arts Endowment.

Attachment 4:  If the information is not included on the nomination form, attach a resume or short biography that outlines the career of the nominee(s), a list of major public appearances or exhibitions by the nominee(s) and the titles of published works, if any. 

Submitting Mailed Nomination Material

The National Endowment for the Arts continues to experience delays and damage to support material (e.g., CDs) in the delivery of First-Class and Priority mail.  We recommended that you use a commercial delivery service.

In addition to the material that you submit electronically through our online nomination form, you must submit work samples by mail to the Arts Endowment.  Your nomination package will not be considered complete without these items.  Please label all materials with the name of the nominee and your name so that we can match your mailed material with your electronic nomination.

• Clearly labeled, recent samples of the work of the artist(s) that correspond with the material detailed on the Work Sample Index submitted as Attachment 2. Visual artists must be represented by digital images; performing artists by CD or DVD.  Samples should be cued to the segment to be reviewed. Other documentation may be added as desired.
• A maximum of five support letters that demonstrate expert and/or community support for this nomination, as listed in Attachment 3.

For any additional mailed material, use only paper clips and rubber bands to fasten your material. Do not bind or staple material.

Send mailed material to:

NEA National Heritage Fellowships
Folk & Traditional Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Room 720
Washington, DC 20506-0001

Phone: 202/682-5587
E-mail: schielec@arts.gov

NOTE: Support material will not be returned except under the most special circumstances. Please do not send the only copy. You may submit additional material in support of your nomination at any time. However, if the review process for the current round of fellowships has started, the staff will retain your material for consideration in future years.

Deadline for Nominations

For FY 2010:

Nominations must be submitted online or received (not postmarked) by mail at the Arts Endowment no later than 5:30 p.m., October 1, 2009. Fellowships will be announced in the spring of 2010.

For FY 2011:
Nominations must be submitted online or received (not postmarked) by mail at the Arts Endowment no later than 5:30 p.m., October 1, 2010.  Fellowships will be announced in the spring of 2011.

Review of Nominations

Nominations submitted to the Arts Endowment by the deadline are reviewed by an advisory panel of folk and traditional arts experts and at least one knowledgeable layperson. Panel recommendations are forwarded to the National Council on the Arts, which then makes recommendations to the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Chairman reviews the Council's recommendations and makes the final decision on all the award recipients.

Nominations that are not selected will be reviewed annually for the next four years.

Folk and Traditional Arts

The folk and traditional arts, which include music, crafts, dance, storytelling, and others, are those that are learned as part of the cultural life of a community whose members share a common ethnic heritage, language, religion, occupation, or geographic region. These traditions are shaped by the aesthetics and values of a shared culture and are passed from generation to generation, most often within family and community through observation, conversation, and practice.

May 2009

National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20506