For more than 20 years, Creative Capital has offered professional development programs that have served more than 200,000 artists across the country. Core to our mission is our belief that professional education is key to helping artists build sustainable careers, creating equity in the arts, and fostering community through horizontal, peer education models.
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Creative Capital Curriculum
We have innovated our approach to artist education by transforming our professional development workshops into a cohesive and current online curriculum. The Creative Capital Curriculum combines evergreen elements of artist professional development with contemporary critical frameworks in cultural discourse to create cohesive, multi-week asynchronous courses. It offers access to exercises from working artists and educators, combining on-demand course modules and live discussions to enhance artists’ professional development.
The Curriculum is FREE for individual, personal use. See our Curriculum Terms of Use.
COURSE 1: REPRESENTING YOUR WORK
This course teaches artists concrete techniques for writing about, speaking about, and representing their practice across a variety of professional contexts, including grant applications, artist talks, and social media. The many ways artists deal in representation to make meaning, exploring questions of representation that are central to both art and politics.
The course consists of eight modules, which guides users through different aspects of representing your work. These modules are asynchronous, meaning that all content is written and/or pre-recorded, and that artists can move through each module at their own pace.
1. Art, Politics, and the Stakes of Representation
As an introduction to the course, this module delves deeper into what it means to “represent,” with a particular focus on the aesthetic and political dimensions of representation.
2. Self Presentation: Artist Statement + Bio + Resume
In professional contexts, artists are often asked to tell the story of who they are professionally through three key documents in an artist’s career: the artist statement, artist bio, and artist resume. This module empowers artists to develop methods for authentic yet tactical communication and self-presentation.
3. Professional Writing: Project Proposals + Descriptions
In this module, artists learn how to compose clear, concise project proposals and work descriptions that communicate the nuance and originality of their thinking while being accessible to broader audiences. Participants practice ways of balancing convention and creativity to develop an approach to professional writing that accurately and effectively reflects their work.
4. Career Documentation: Work Samples + Archiving
This module focuses on preparing work samples across various media and disciplines, exploring the different concerns and criteria facing time-based artists, artists working with ephemeral materials, and artists using emerging technologies difficult to capture in a work sample or archive. Through this interdisciplinary conversation, artists develop techniques for preparing work samples that best represent their practice, and strategies for archiving their work that can be implemented at any stage of a career.
5. Practical Administration: Timelines + Budgets + Planning
Timelines and budgets are not just practical tools for managing a project or practice. They are documents that tell the story of the work and process and allow planning for the future. In this module, artists learn how to effectively use timelines and budgets to represent their practice, as well as long-term planning skills like time management and goal setting.
6. Articulating Your Practice: Artist Talks + Elevator Pitches
Voice as an artist is powerful. Funders, collectors, viewers, readers, students, etc. often want to hear from living artists directly, and speaking about work can have consequences for how it is supported, represented, and experienced. Participants in this module develop tools for speaking about their work in different contexts, from long-form artist talks to short-form elevator pitches.
7. Promoting Your Work: Press Releases + Interviews
This module emphasizes that artists have agency around the visibility of their projects and practices. Participants learn how to write a press release, how to prepare for interviews with press, and how to lift up the work of other artists in the field in community, classroom, panel, performance, exhibition, and other contexts.
8. Online Presence: Website + Social Media
Artists learn how to craft a professional website where nominators, panelists, curators, programmers, and the general public can learn about their projects and current work. Participants will also learn effective strategies for connecting directly with new audiences through social media.
Peer-to-Peer Learning + Artist Labs
A key feature of the Creative Capital Curriculum is peer-to-peer learning—a pedagogical approach that centers the lived experience of artists. Artists can engage each other in Canvas through an interactive Discussion Board that accompanies the course and offers prompts for discussion and reflection. They can also enhance their experience through Artist Labs, a series of live, synchronous, online, peer-to-peer, info session-styled discussions. The Artist Labs are designed to activate and supplement the asynchronous course content through the perspective of a Creative Capital artist, who offers their experience as an entry point for further discussion.
Artist Lab: Low-Stress Networking for Artists with Meredith Talusan
Networking can feel stressful for many artists, especially at a time when we feel ever-increasing pressure to pitch and promote our work. How can we as artists build community in ways that utilize our own specific strengths and tendencies, and reframe networking activities in ways that feel good to us? 2023 Creative Capital Awardee Meredith Talusan and former Director of Artist Initiatives Aliza Shvarts discuss the ins and outs of low-stress artist networking.
Become an Institutional Member of Curriculum
Help to sustain this resource and foster a more equitable arts ecosystem by becoming an Institutional Member.
Benefits of Institutional Membership
Use our curriculum across your institution. Provide your institution’s faculty, staff, students, grantees, fellows, artist residents, and administrators with access to an ever-expanding collection of professional development programs created by experienced artists, industry professionals, and educators.
Be listed as an institutional member on our website and in our communications. Signal your support for this shared resource for artists by becoming an institutional member. Member names and/or logos will be listed on the Creative Capital website and in Curriculum communications, as well as acknowledged in our annual Impact Report.
Publish jointly-created online content into the platform for artists everywhere to access. Institutional members have the opportunity to co-produce online content with Creative Capital for the Curriculum, which will be visible and accessible to our community of 80,000 artists who access our resources and services.
Institutional Membership dues are $5,000 per year for 2024/2025. Contact [email protected] for more information. We also welcome donations and sponsorships in support of our educational programs, please contact [email protected].
Online Educational Resources
Sundance Collab Advisor Studio
Sundance Collab is the Sundance Institute’s online learning and community platform for independent filmmakers at all stages of their creative journeys. Join Sundance Collab to learn through live events and courses, connect with other filmmakers through the Community Forum, and move your project forward with help from the directory of resources and grants and opportunities.
Financial Planning for Creatives: From Taxes to Retirement
Applying for Grants
Applying for funding can be an opaque process, and artists are often left in the dark about what makes the best application. We have compiled some articles that will help you present yourself in the best possible light to panel reviewers and granting foundations.
- The Do’s and Don’ts of Finding and Securing the Right Grant for Your Work
- How to Craft a Successful Artist Statement
- Inside a Grant or Residency Panel Process
- Applying for Grants: Overview
- How to Write a Grant Proposal with Confidence: First Steps
- How to Write a Grant Proposal with Confidence: Translating Your Ideas on Paper
- Applying for Grants: Choosing Work Samples
- Applying for Grants: Creating A Realistic Budget
- Creating Your Artist Resume
Financial Tips
From taxes to funding to budgets, an artist’s finances are often complex and multilayered. Creative Capital helps artists consider all aspects of project funding and financial preparedness across all creative disciplines.
Navigating Current Challenges
In this time of upheaval and unprecedented challenge, artists are adapting to cope with the pandemic and economic shutdown. Our archived series of free online conversations shares resources and expertise for sustainable practices, assisting communities, and more.
Career Documentation and Archiving
Career documentation and archiving are essential components of an artist’s life, practice, and legacy. These resources offer practical and multidisciplinary guidance, tips, and additional resources on how to document and archive your work.
Digital Communications
These resources provide artists with a comprehensive understanding of how to use the web to effectively communicate about their practice, exhibitions, and events, whether through email communications or social media.
Taller Archive
These resources are from Taller, a Creative Capital program tailored to address the challenges faced by Latinx artists working in multiple cultural and linguistic contexts in New York City, while fostering a supportive peer community of artists advocating for themselves and each other.