For Kids
Impanda is, a 501c3 nonprofit organization providing healing-focused music and arts programs.
Arts Therapy
Grantee
Grantees
Spokane Arts Grant Awards (SAGA) funds multiple programs and projects three times every year through a competitive application process. Grant winners carry out arts related activities in the Spokane area during the twelve months following their award date. Awards can be for any amount up to $10,000.
SAGA defines the term “arts” by observing our community’s creative activity. We live in a region populated by many cultures, talented in varied crafts and trades, and curious about learning and engaging in technique, expression, and artistic community. SAGA has funded blacksmithing and glassblowing, cultural art forms such as canoe making, performance, exhibition, education, therapy, and individual artistic development. We have also funded arts-based businesses and new collaborations.
SAGA stands on the principle that creatives should be paid for the work they do and we educate both the broader community and the artistic sector that creative work has value.
2023 was SAGA’s seventh year serving the Spokane region. At the end of its seventh year, SAGA had funded 171 proposals providing a total of more than $800,000 dollars to local artists, organizations, and businesses. Below we provide a complete list of each of our awardees since our first year of funding in 2017.
View just the most recent year’s winners here.
Visual
Grantee
Sean Finley, This Had Better Be Good Films
Jess Walter has given his permission to adapt his short story, We Live in Water, to film. The story is about toxic masculinity, the culture that allows it and the power it has to destroy generations.
Dance
Grantee
Spokane Aerial Performance Arts LLC
With SAGA support, the circus will provide a performance opportunity for individuals and groups by student aerialists as young as 6 years old.
Stage
Grantee
Spokane Shakespeare Society
SAGA is thrilled to be supporting the new Spokane Shakespeare Society (S3) for the first two shows in late summer at Riverfront Park and their fall 2021 activities.
Cultural
Grantee
The Family Guide
The Family Guide will be working with AAPI artists, performers and culture bearers in the Spokane community to create a free, community-based arts and culture exhibition.
Film
Grantee
Sean Lizama, Milestones Media
Lizama’s new documentary aims to give voice to a group of five Marshallese youth, all high school dropouts at high risk from marginalized families.
Visual
Grantee
Melanie Hewitt
Using a popular children’s book style, Hewitt’s new work forces perspective on adult topics and their true importance.
Stage
Grantee
Spokane Playwrights Laboratory
SAGA funding will support SPL’s efforts to grow and develop the Spokane theater scene.
Words
Grantee
Kate Lebo
Kate Lebo will be writing five chapters of her next book: a collection of essays about listening through hearing loss.
For Kids
Grantee
Mary Carpenter and Mary Pat Kanaley
Ponies in the Park is a fully illustrated, four-color, hardback picture book, which incorporates Spokane’s Riverfront Park into local art and history education.
Cultural
Grantee
Northwest Winterfest
Northwest Winterfests’ Celebration of the Holidays is a single event that spans eight weeks starting November 1, 2021 in Mirabeau Meadows Park.