In 2025, United States Artists entered its 20th year of commitment to artists and creative practitioners. Throughout the year, we listened to learn more about what artists need most: how we can offer durable, sustainable, holistic support, now and into the future. Building from our center — the USA Fellowship program and Initiatives awards — we are working to expand how we work to improve conditions for all artists in all ways, as always — across America, through growing efforts to address public policy, capital support, and communications.

Culminating an intentional period of research, the multi-organizational National Arts Policy Alliance (NAPA) entered its early implementation phase. NAPA, a coalition incubated within USA in partnership with organizations across the country, is dedicated to building collective power among creative and cultural workers to establish cross-sectoral economic rights for all. In addition, we strengthened our focus on Artist Services, a vital benefit that provides additional resources — in tandem with the award support — for awardees to meet needs such as financial planning. We encourage awardees to utilize the funds creatively and determine what support means to them. 

By listening to and working directly with artists, we learn how to best support them. In the same spirit, we learn from collaborating and building coalitions with institutions who share this vision. 

With great enthusiasm, we are joining forces with Artadia for the much-missed Assembly which will convene the last few years of our respective Fellows and Awardees in events taking place in 2026 and 2027. We also look forward to announcing our newest cohort of USA Fellows on January 14, 2026. In the meanwhile, we hope you enjoy highlights of our grantmaking, Initiatives, and events and publishing efforts from the past year.

USA Fellowship

This past January, we were thrilled to award fifty exceptional artists and collectives with the 2025 USA Fellowship. Working in ten disciplines in twenty-one US states, spanning all career stages, these artists center origin and belonging, exploring identity, and regional specificity. While awarded in specific disciplines, many of their practices push against and expand these definitions. Often, they are collaborators, following the adage that we go further, together. 

Initiatives Awards

We continued to partner with organizations to administer award programs and strengthen artist-centered ecosystems of support in communities across the country. In 2025, five new media artists received the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, an award supported by the Knight Foundation. Five craftspeople received the Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Craft Award, supported by the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation awarded four visionary Bay Area artists working across dance, film, public space and theater with the Rainin Arts Fellowship. 

We announced a new partnership with the Wagner Foundation, and launched the Wagner Arts Fellowship, supporting an inaugural class of three artists in the Greater Boston area who are deeply embedded within their communities and at a pivotal moment in their artistic trajectory.

The Joyce Foundation announced the recipients of the 2025 Creative Impact Awards, a one-time funding opportunity honoring 60 artists and 57 organizations that have enriched the Great Lakes region through creativity and culture. 

Finally, as part of the culminating year of the Disability Futures Fellowship, a program supported by Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation, artists who received a Disability Futures Fellowship nominated 43 organizations to receive awards in recognition of their tireless support for disabled artists and their projects.

Events and Publishing

We published the final two issues of our homespun online artists’ quarterly, New Suns. Awardees of the Disability Futures Fellowship assumed the mantle of that last issue of New Suns, reflecting on the passage of time and what comes next. Shift Space, a digital publication that explores new media landscapes, also released its fifth and final issue. We are proud of the great body of visual art, poetry, and critical writing held within these publications and are grateful to the myriad artists and creative practitioners who trusted us with their work. What we learned from facilitating these projects, we continue to carry forward in ongoing editorial endeavors. 

Over the year, we hosted numerous conversations with USA Fellows about their practices and shared them on our website and in our biweekly newsletter, which also highlights news and events from USA awardees. 

This year, we hosted events that ranged from intimate community convenings in New York and Miami to explorations of a new kind of public gathering: our listening parties. These events supported works-in-progress by USA Fellows, and shared early iterations to captive audiences. Angel Bat Dawid (2025, Music) previewed Blk Metropolis Apocalypse in a performance with D-Composed. In Minneapolis, we hosted a reading by Danez Smith (2021, Writing) against the backdrop of the Grantmakers in the Arts conference.