Grantee Tells Its Own Story from the Inside Out

[Source: Heinz Endowments]

Last year, the Heinz Endowments launched a new interactive section of its website, “In the Spotlight,” where grantees have a forum to tell their stories directly as they know best.

Now in the Spotlight: Meet Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

Pittsburgh Filmmakers is one of the largest and oldest independent media arts centers in the country. Founded in 1971 to provide media-making tools to artists, Filmmakers serves emerging and established artists, nonprofit organizations and students. In January 2006, Filmmakers merged with Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, broadening its artistic offerings to southwestern Pennsylvania.

Filmmakers provides a curriculum of courses in film, video and photography to university and independent students in the Pittsburgh region. The organization exhibits the work of prominent photographers and filmmakers in its two galleries, where it also displays work by students and members twice a year. It owns and operates three theaters in the Pittsburgh region: the Harris Theater in Pittsburgh's downtown Cultural District, the Regent Square Theater in Edgewood and the Melwood Screening Room in its main building in North Oakland. All theaters exhibit a wide variety of first-run foreign and independent American films as well as classics and documentaries.

The organization’s Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is a nonprofit community arts campus that offers arts education programs and contemporary art exhibitions. It provides services and resources for individual artists throughout the region and offers programming that allows community residents to see, learn, create and support visual arts.

Both Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts have been longtime grantees of the Heinz Endowments, together receiving more than $8 million in grants over the years. This year, Filmmakers received more than $385,000 for various projects, including the purchase of new equipment; professional development of local artists; and a media immersion project for the Endowments’ summer youth philanthropy interns, which resulted in the creation of documentary videos related to their grant making.

Read the initial blog entries for Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and don’t forget to check back during the next two weeks to keep up with its posts. Click on “Follow this Spotlight,” and you will receive an e-mail with a link every time the organization posts an entry. And remember to leave a comment on what you read from the Filmmakers.

To check blog entries, videos, photos and links of previous Spotlight participants, visit the Spotlight Archives.

If you are a Heinz Endowments grantee and would like to get your organization in the Spotlight, visit their site for the details.