April 12^th, 2006 marks the twelfth year in which CalArts and the Herb Alpert Foundation announce the recipients of Alpert Award fellowships. Also, for the first time, the Alpert Award is sponsoring twelve residency prizes.

 

CalArts President Steven D. Lavine said: "The CalArts community congratulates Jim Hodges, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sarah Michelson, Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris and Bill Morrison. We are very pleased that CalArts is part of the process of providing funding, time and opportunity for these gifted artists. We look forward to welcoming all five to our campus for the residency portion of the fellowships."

 

First established in 1994, the Alpert Award in the Arts provides five $50,000 fellowships each year to ‘early mid-career’ artists in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater and visual arts — five of the six disciplines taught at CalArts. Each fellowship includes a weeklong residency at CalArts where the award recipients work with students in their respective fields. "The Alpert Award seeks to identify artists who have both vision and broad perspective and are contributing something significant to contemporary life," said Alpert Foundation President Rona Sebastian. "Whether they use it for project support, or to improve the quality of their lives, we hope that the prize allows the artists to move forward in whatever way they perceive useful in fulfilling their vision. We’d like to think that the sharing of their gifts might help to make our world a more vital and compassionate place.

 

Building on a successful on-going collaboration with the Ucross Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation is delighted to announce the second year of three pilot programs that enable it to recognize a larger number of the talented and committed Alpert Award nominees. With the generosity of the participating artists’ residencies, Hedgebrook, The MacDowell Colony, and Ragdale as well as Ucross, each artist chosen for a residency prize is awarded a one-month stay and transportation stipend funded by their host colony.

 

The award is funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and administered by CalArts on behalf of the foundation. Independent three person review panels in each discipline choose the recipients after ten nominators in each discipline recommend two persons each for a total of 50 nominations.

 

For information about the Alpert Award, go to www.alpertawards.org. More information about CalArts can be found at www.calarts.edu.