Mara Mills Awarded $1 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation

The three-year grant will support Mills and the NYU Center for Disability Studies in running the Access for Small Arts Partnerships program.

People sit in a circle — A 2017 gathering that sparked the ASAP program. Photo by Earl Cabbell.

Mara Mills and the NYU Center for Disability Studies (CDS) have been awarded a three-year, $1,045,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support a program called ASAP: Access for Small Arts Partnerships. ASAP seeks to bolster the ability of small arts organizations to more successfully incorporate digital and physical accessibility. This is Mills’ second Mellon grant.

Mara Mills, associate professor in NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and director of its PhD program, is also the director of CDS. Founded in 2017, CDS is a mixed-ability team that includes deaf, blind, neurodivergent, and chronically ill scholars, artists, and administrators; it regularly hosts public disability arts events across different art forms and venues.

The idea for ASAP grew out of CDS fielding requests from small arts spaces for providing assistance with or advice about audio description, touch tours, captioning and other forms of digital access to make their events more accessible for artists and patrons alike.

“We want to help support this important space of small arts,” says Mills. “New disability artists tend to get their start at small arts organizations, which often have limited operational budgets and staff who may not have the training, funding, or time to work on creative access.”

ASAP responds to this labor gap in arts access by allowing CDS to work with groups like the NYC Coalition of Small Arts to pair administrators at small arts organizations with trained, paid student workers across NYU’s academic schools.

“NYU represents a wealth of student knowledge that small arts organizations could leverage to help build their capacity in accessibility for arts curation, archiving, and distribution,” says Mills. NYU Steinhardt offers a range of programming in related areas for students of all levels, such as the Disability Studies minor, Music Technology program, and Visual Arts Administration program.

photo of Mara Mills, a middle aged white woman with brown curly hair, lecturing behind a white podium

Creative access is a newer field, so we’re excited to work on this in an improvisational and collaborative way with our partners.

Mara Mills, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and PhD Director

Small arts organizations will be paired with student interns who have expertise in a complementary academic area to work together on a specific project, such as creating descriptions for a sound art performance or video archive or creating tactile versions of abstract visual art. Students will take a one-semester arts accessibility course, as well as a semester- and/or summer-long paid internship with the arts partner.

“Using paid student labor makes a lot of sense for ASAP for many reasons, including tailored training and fair labor practices,” says Mills. “Creative access is a newer field, so we’re excited to work on this in an improvisational and collaborative way with our partners.”

The ASAP program launches this Spring and looks to pair students with around six to eight arts organizations in its first year. The Mellon grant funding will support the program through 2028.

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