Creative Capital, the nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression by supporting individual artists across the United States, announced that it will award $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists residing in all 50 states and territories.
Zachariah Ezer, assistant professor of performing arts, has been awarded the State of the Art Prize from Creative Capital.
A brand-new addition to their annual Creative Capital Awards, the inaugural State of the Art Prize will provide a $10,000 unrestricted grant to 53 individual artists, one in every state, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. With this new grant, Creative Capital extends its democratic, national, open call to serve more artists at the grassroots level and to foster creativity and innovation in a broad range of rural, regional, and urban communities.
"This prize will help support a project that is the culmination of the theatrical work I've been doing my entire career so far, " said Zachariah. "Pine Bluff, AR is a Black response to Our Town, engaging with Afropessimism, ergodic/epistolary literature, and techniques from documentary & devised theater."
The artists receiving the 2026 Creative Capital Award and 2026 State of the Art Prize were selected from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States via a democratic, national open call. Project proposals were evaluated through an external review process that included 107 industry leaders, programmers, cultural producers, and artists, and culminated in discipline-specific final panels.
Read more on the Creative Capital website.
