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Production
Grants

Apply for funds for your project!

Participate

Dance On Camera recognizes that funding is crucial at all stages of film production. Whether you need to write a script, pay for a location, secure an editing suite, or pay your performers, our Production Grants can help you get closer to finishing your film. Production Grants are open exclusively to Dance On Camera Members. Applications open in the late winter and grantees are notified in June.

2024 Application Window

Opens: March 2, 2024
Closes: April 9, 2024 at 11:59 p.m

Notifications will be sent out on May 21, 2024

Requirements
  • Individual Membership with Dance on Camera
  • Project Description
  • Team Description
  • Timeline and Schedule
  • Budget and Budget Notes
  • Outline/Treatment, Storyboard, and/or Script
  • Current Needs to Complete Film
  • Visual Support
  • Submission by Deadline
Details

One grantee will receive the Full Production Grant; two recipients will receive honorary awards; and an honorable mention will be offered to a fourth recipient.

The Honorable Mention awardee will be invited to show their project as an in-progress screening at the Dance On Camera Festival. This special screening is designed to increase the film’s visibility and to provide the filmmaker with audience feedback in a moderated discussion with an esteemed member of the dance film community. Please note that the film must be in the final stages of production to be eligible for this screening. Also, the director(s) must be available to attend the screening in person. Travel is not provided.

Production Grant

Past Recipients

2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
Full recipient

HOME (In)STEAD

Megan Lowe and Nguyen
HOME(in)STEAD is an hour-long site-specific dance experience for intimate audiences of just 12-15 per performance. The dancers moves from front door to salon, through hallways and bedrooms, and up to the roof, utilizing the entirety of late conceptual artist David Ireland’s unique historic house turned work of art to explore themes of home and the intersection of dance, sculpture, and performance. The piece features original music by cello player Peekaboo and lighting by Rico Duenas.
Honorary award

Ten Times Better: George Lee's Historic Leap

Jennifer Lin
George Lee’s creaky 88-year-old body disguises an astonishing past as a breakthrough figure in ballet—the first Asian to dance for the New York City Ballet, tapped by George Balanchine for his original production of The Nutcracker. Exhorted by his mother to be “ten times better” than the others in the all-white world of dance, he was denied a career in ballet. But he persevered to dance on Broadway for Gene Kelly and in countless productions across his adopted homeland, then landing in Las Vegas for a second career as a blackjack dealer, happy and humble.

Parallel World

Liz Sargent
Imagery of peeling off the raw aged walls, dried starch on the body of the dancers. A woman moisturizes her face, then proceeds to cover her entire body with the thick white cream. She stands and we time lapse as it hardens across her body, this feels as if the dancer's skin is falling off and eventually cracking - she falls into a light pile of dust and poof....The shape of the space leads the shot list, offering obstructions to the movement and shapes of the body. Freedom and exploration in a new skin.

Expiration

Mike Tyus & Luca Renzi
Synopsis
Full recipient

TENS ACROSS THE BORDERS

CHAN Sze-Wei
When New York’s underground ballroom culture burst onto mainstream media, hardly anyone knew the nascent scenes in Southeast Asia. This film follows Sun, Teddy and Xyza trailblazing the way in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. They build found families and safer spaces, walk international balls and gain recognition as members of major ballroom houses. Their stories and struggles are interwoven with the colouful fabric of daily life in Southeast Asia. Teddy and Xyza finally travel to meet their houses in New York, while Sun premieres his dance solo, using ballroom culture to tell his life story.
Honorary award

A SIGH OF ORIGIN

Katherine Maxwell
Conceptualized by Katherine Maxwell, ‘a sigh of origin’ is a dance film featuring nine dancers representing a single individual and the various lives lost and found throughout a lifetime: processes of shedding and transforming. Influenced by time spent with Maxwell’s 90-year old grandmother, ‘a sigh of origin’ will convey how change in a person over a lifetime, be it 18, 34 or 90 years, affects how one relates to the world around them. The cast made up of men, women, and non-binary individuals from a range of cultural backgrounds, represent how a person evolves as an effect of pivotal moments.
Honorary award

107 EILEEN KRAMER

Sue Healey
Eileen Kramer is an Australian dancer, choreographer, artist and writer – a true creative spirit – born in 1914 and still making art in 2022 at the age of 107. A member of the Bodenwieser Ballet (1940s), Australia’s first modern dance company, Eileen toured internationally and then spent the next 70 years living and working in India, Europe and America. She returned to Sydney at 99 with only a suitcase and a desire to keep creating. Using interviews, recent and historical footage from the 1940s, this dance portrait/doco reveals her creative manifesto and inimitable spirit.
Work in Progress screening

CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

Bijoyini Chatterjee
Eight exceptional dancers from diverse cultures, different bodies and different concepts of beauty gather in Boston and embark on a unique journey to reinterpret a beloved 12th century Sufi poem “Conference of the Birds”. The film will follow the ephemeral journey of these eight dancers as they learn to be different together and merge their artistic voices through an Islamic text, motifs and symbols. By interweaving Attar’s allegorical poem with the story of the dancers, the film will capture the importance in difference, in found communities and the interdependence of all of us.
Full recipient

THIS ONE THEN

Charlotte Griffin
This One Then is a remote screendance project featuring a multigenerational ensemble of solo and duet performers “at home” during pandemic isolation. Directed by Charlotte Griffin with producers Johanna Witherby and MiRi Park, This One Then explores repetition and accumulation to highlight the monotony and intimacy of this time. Drawing connections across individual scenes, a narrator and singer describe the evolving duets creating a lyrical and touching portrait of “alone, together.”
Honorary award

EVERYTHING YOU HAVE IS YOURS

Tatyana Tenenbaum
Israeli/American NYC-based choreographer Hadar Ahuvia is the granddaughter of Zionist ‘kibbutzniks,’ collectivist pioneers in 1920’s Palestine. Out of their need for a national cultural identity grew Israeli folk dance. Salient amongst their source material were dances and songs appropriated from Palestinians, the people whose land they occupied and ultimately displaced. While Hadar’s family moved between Israel/Palestine and the US/Turtle Island, Hadar grew up dancing in her mother’s Israeli folk dance troupe. As an adult, she begins to question the implications of these dances. Motivated by voices of Palestinians, the Jewish Left and the insights of her collaborators, Hadar’s growing awareness drives a wedge between her ideological past and an emergent future beyond Zionism.
Honorary award

MARTYR’S FICTION

Kayla Farrish
Martyr’s Fiction witnesses five venturing Black American and Women characters allowing themselves to finally dream, eruptively questioning reality, to reclaim life in a dance-theater narrative-film. Stemming from “who can afford to dream?” with lives based in survival and reality immersed in overwhelming surreal violence, each character pushes up against their boundaries-imposed and personal. In varying forms of film, histories, fantasy, and embodiment, their personal quests move through both imagination and reckon with truth as they transform. Immersing in stories of martyrs and unsung heroes, the narrative confronts what we think isn’t possible for ourselves- dismantling present conditions within American oppression.

Work in Progress screening

UNBROKEN

Bijoyini Chatterjee
One of the most persistent stereotypes about black fathers is that they are absent and one of the most common clichés about Krump dance is that it is aggressive, and only that. Our documentary proves both assumptions wrong. We show a group of loving and caring black fathers for whom their children mean the world. And we witness a dance form that, in all its facets and richness, for the dancers opens a way to all of their emotions, and sometimes unlocks feelings they didn’t know they were holding deep down.
Full recipient

Far

Omri Drumlevich
Far is a dance film that moves through 6 individual stories of fascination with the unknown and the primal urge to explore it.In a gloomy, silent world these lonely nomadic explorers long for connection and even though they exist in different times and spaces- they manage to cross paths and even fall in love and dance together in the same place.
Honorary award

A HIGHWIRE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Jacquelyn Elder
A Highwire of Circumstance is an observational documentary capturing the ceaseless effort of the Martha Graham Dance Company as they continue navigating uncharted territory while striving to remain faithful to a singular groundbreaking vision of an absent founder, Ms. Martha Graham.Martha Graham, known to many as the pioneer of American modern dance, was the charismatic embodiment of her revolution in dance. Her approach to dance and theater revolutionized the art form and her innovative physical vocabulary has irrevocably influenced dance worldwide. Until she was obliged to step down from the stage, Martha Graham performed the lead roles of all her choreographies and her passion was transmitted through her own voice and direction until April 1,1991 when Martha Graham died.
Honorary award

SPELL BOUND

Nicola Hepp
A woman is walking slowly through the dark, untouched forest. She is following someone in the distance, someone she can’t quite make out. She has the sensation of being trapped and her thoughts are blurred. Suddenly, the woman realizes that she doesn’t know if she is the pursuer or the one being hunted. Too late, her perception becomes clear, but by then she has already taken a dire decision. Spell Bound is a journey into a troubled mind, an attempt to imagine what it must be like to be in a psychosis, and not be able to think clearly anymore. When that state of mind can lure you into making fatal choices, who can you trust?.
Work in Progress screening

CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

Bijoyini Chatterjee
Eight exceptional dancers from diverse cultures, different bodies and different concepts of beauty gather in Boston and embark on a unique journey to reinterpret a beloved 12th century Sufi poem “Conference of the Birds”. The film will follow the ephemeral journey of these eight dancers as they learn to be different together and merge their artistic voices through an Islamic text, motifs and symbols. By interweaving Attar’s allegorical poem with the story of the dancers, the film will capture the importance in difference, in found communities and the interdependence of all of us.
Full recipient

WRITTEN ON WATER

Pontus Lidberg
Happily married but haunted by an unresolved affair from her past, choreographer Alicia (Aurélie Dupont) plumbs the depths of her memories to create a new dance work about unfulfilled desire. Against the backdrop of an ageing theatre by the sea, she builds a sensual and naked work delicately held together by the threads connecting her dancers with each other and with her. Alicia soon finds herself fallen down the rabbit hole of her own creation, in love with the lead dancer, Giovanni (Alexander Jones), and the siren of her fictional work becomes the siren of her life. As she recounts her story to Karl (Pontus Lidberg), his own story brings an unexpected dimension to this exploration of longing and artistic creation. Written on Water is a sensuous and philosophical interrogation of the permeable boundaries between fiction and reality, muse and siren, male and female, and the mutability of the roles we play—Odysseus, sailor, siren—in our lifelong quests for connection, love and inspiration.
Honorary award

MONSTER NEWS FEED

Cara Hagan
This work follows a central character who, when overwhelmed and attacked by the media they consume (literally and figuratively) through digital and analogue means, decides to fight back to reclaim sound body and mind. Following an epic battle, the character makes their way through a magical portal that brings them to the land where they can heal. Born of the director’s research on device use, information addiction, and the effects of a constant stream of news on the body, this piece weaves aspects of science, shared cultural experiences and magical realism to make commentary on our ever-changing relationship to wellbeing.
Honorary award

WESTERN

Ellen Smith Ahern
Western experiments with storytelling by pairing women’s dancing bodies with the landscape and voices of a rural Wyoming community. The project integrates dance, film and storytelling to explore perceptions of the American West and American identity. Set in rural Wyoming, Western depicts relationships shaped by great distances, manifest in both the vast expanse of sky and landscape and the immediate physical tension of two humans moving in and out of sight and contact. When layered with the voices of community members, the work becomes an experiment in inclusivity, creating space for diverse voices and bodies in a rich, challenging landscape while engaging modern dance to provide visceral access points to the truths and memories words touch upon.
Work in Progress screening

OBSESSED WITH LIGHT: THE GENIUS OF LOIE FULLER

Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbuehl
OBSESSED WITH LIGHT will tell the story of Loïe Fuller, a visionary artist and technological trailblazer who overcame numerous hurdles to become one of the most famous dancers of her day. She launched Isadora Duncan’s career, promoted Auguste Rodin’s sculpture in the U.S. and inspired Picasso, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. Her passion for science and technology led her to extraordinary innovations in lighting and stagecraft. The film will be structured around the creation of a new dance by American choreographer Jody Sperling, interweaving stunning hand-tinted vintage footage of Fuller’s dances and interviews with contemporary artists and performers influenced by her.