Tennessee Arts Commission — Individual Artist Fellowship (FY28)

This is an unrestricted USD 5,000 award for the work you have already done, not funding for a project. No match is required and you do not have to spend it on anything in particular. The Commission expects to give roughly one to three fellowships in each discipline, music among them.

You must be at least 18, a legal Tennessee resident with a Tennessee mailing address, and have lived in the state for the past three consecutive years — proof is a Tennessee voter registration card or driver's licence. You also need to be earning money from your art, and that income has to be a meaningful part of how you live. Past fellowship recipients, full-time students, full-time state employees (faculty excepted) and Commission staff and their families cannot apply, and you may only enter one category per year.

Music splits into two routes, and both are narrower than they first look. Performance-based applicants submit two live performance videos from the past three years, ten minutes each at most: instrumentalists from classical, jazz or comparable traditions, vocalists from opera, musical theatre or similar. Composition-based applicants submit two original works with properly notated scores as PDFs. Commercial music videos, streaming links, heavily edited recordings, remixes and sampling-led work are not adjudicated at all.

Applications open in October 2026 and close Friday 15 January 2027 at 11:59 p.m. CST, through the Commission's online grants portal — register early, since it does not auto-save. You also upload a professional resume and residency proof. Out-of-state adjudicators in your discipline score the entries, weighing artistic excellence in the work samples above everything else, though the artist statement can factor in.