Applications Open For GreenStage Guilford 2024 Artist Awards

Applications are now open for the GreenStage Live Arts 2024 Artists’ Awards, which will commission new works by Connecticut artists in dance, drama and music. GreenStage will award as many as three $5,000 grants for the creation of new work to be premiered at the next festival, in September 2025. 

The festival has granted a total of $27,500 since 2018 to 12 performing artists, who have created or completed new work—three in dance, five in drama and three in music. The grants have enabled the festival to bring innovative new works to Shoreline Connecticut audiences, helped bolster the careers of Connecticut performers and, during the Covid pandemic, provided artists with a bit of income when they couldn’t perform in public. 

Applications are being accepted for awards in three categories: music, dance and drama (which will also include all forms of spoken word, including poetry, storytelling and comedy). GreenStage intends to present one award in each category; the final number and categories of awards granted will be determined by panels of GreenStage judges based on the applications’ merit. All professional performing artists who live in Connecticut are eligible. Recipients must use the grant to develop original, new work and premiere it at the 2025 GreenStage Live Arts Festival, tentatively scheduled for September 21-28, 2025. 

Award criteria, rules and an online application can be found at greenstageguilford.org. Applications will close on July 15, 2024. Recipients will be notified in September and will have approximately one year to complete their work.  

GreenStage created the Artists’ Awards program in 2018 as a way to support the creation of new work by Connecticut performing artists and to provide a vehicle for premiering original material at the biennial GreenStage festival. The grants are possible in large part because of the generosity of donors through the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven’s The Great Give and other festival supporters. 

The 2025 festival will feature live music, drama and dance, public and in-school performing arts workshops, and arts-based community-service projects. Events will take place on the historic Guilford Green as well as in various other locations in Guilford and other Shoreline towns. It will be the fifth GreenStage Live Arts Festival (formerly Guilford Performing Arts Festival); it started in 2017 with the goals of energizing the Connecticut Shoreline with live entertainment, providing innovative arts education, employing the arts in community building and human service, providing a platform for diverse voices, and supporting and showcasing the work of Connecticut artists. 

Since its first year, GreenStage has presented 132 live shows, 51 public and in-school workshops and master classes, reached an audience more than 12,000, served approximately 1,000 students of all ages and contributed an estimated $1.1 million to the local economy. 

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