Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance, announces that the Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists (DFA) program will conclude following the end of its current and third round in October 2026. Created in 2018, the DFA program honors dance and movement-based artists with sustained practices in art for social change, and has awarded 86 Artist Fellows from across the United States and its territories. The Round Three Artist Fellows were announced in November 2025, and this cohort will be the final one of the program. The DFA program has been made possible with generous, multi-year support from the Doris Duke Foundation, which will conclude at the end of 2026. Dance/USA has been working in partnership with the Doris Duke Foundation for nearly two decades, a collaboration that has fueled major field initiatives, such as Engaging Dance Audiences (EDA) and DFA.
“The focus of DFA is the artists, and that remains: celebrating the 86 outstanding artists of the program who have committed their lives and work to social transformation through movement and dance. We are deeply grateful to the artists, advisors, and administrators who built DFA together. This work has shown how institutions can hold power differently, how artists shape systems, and what it takes to build more equitable forms of support,” shared Haowen Wang, Dance/USA Director of Regranting.
One of the few regranting programs with an unrestricted financial award available to independent artists, the DFA program supports dance and movement-based artists from across the U.S. and its territories who work at the intersection of social and embodied practices. DFA recognizes the wide variety of ways in which artists engage in social transformation through dance, which often do not fit into established models of arts funding. This includes community-building and culture-bearing practices, healing and storytelling practices, activism and representational justice practices, and more.
As the DFA program concludes, Dance/USA is using this moment to reflect on what DFA has built, and what it reveals about the future of artist-centered funding.
Since 2018, DFA has provided more than $2,727,000 of unrestricted funds directly to artists, along with additional resources. In Rounds Two and Three, DFA expanded beyond funding to support artist-led gatherings, providing paid time for collaboration, rest, and reflection. These spaces were self-directed by the artists, with financial and administrative support from Dance/USA.
Over the course of Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists’ nine years, over 190 artists and cultural workers have contributed their time, expertise, and labor to the program’s evolution. DFA has evolved into a field-recognized model for equitable grantmaking that positions artists not only as recipients of funding, but as co-designers of the structures that support their work. Following the conclusion of DFA, Dance/USA will document and share the program’s learnings and perspectives with the broader arts and philanthropic sectors.
Learn more about the Dance/USA Artist Fellows and their work.
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