🍞

I love writing grants! It’s so much more fun and easy than playing music ... said no musician, ever.

Talking about grantwriting is like talking about writing about art. That seems like a real bummer of a situation to be in yet many artists are eager to understand how to turn their passion into prose in a way that speaks to funders while not betraying their vision. I am called on to speak on this topics across many disciplines every year but in 2013 MacPhaill Center for Music asked me to describe an approach to grantwriting through the lens of music. So I took a crack at marrying form to funding and this is what I got.

Noah Keesecker is a composer and multimedia artist who creates works that are equally at home in the concert hall as they are in the dance club. He is made of video, installations, literature, science, interactive performance art, animation, ping pong, sawdust, synthesizers, and bicycle grease. He is driven by an insatiable curiosity, a mercurial imagination, and an enterprising spirit, all aimed at the goal of forging sound and sight with physical, tactile, interactive and object-oriented approaches to music. Among his grants and awards are a 2008 McKnight Composer Fellowship, Jerome Composer Commissioning Grant and a Jerome Club 416 commission from the Cedar Cultural Center.

Outside of the studio, Noah is Director of Artist Development at Springboard for the Arts, where he takes a strategic, energetic, and very human approach to building Springboard’s professional practices curriculum for creatives of all stripes. He serves on the board of directors for Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, one of the premier arts advocacy organizations in the country, and on the advisory committee for Slam Academy, a digital arts music lab in downtown Minneapolis.

Noah lives in Minneapolis with a cat, a dog, and a librarian, and is currently building his first boat, albeit a small one.