Recent Grants

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aims to strengthen and promote contributions of the humanities and the arts to community improvement and diversity. The Foundation makes grants in the following five core program areas:

1. Arts and Cultural Heritage - seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and conservation practices in the arts, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for these disciplines. The program supports the work of artists, curators, conservators, and scholars, and aims to strengthen performing arts organizations, art museums, research institutes, and conservation centers.
2. Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities – helps institutions and professional organizations respond to the economic, demographic, financial, and technological challenges affecting higher education; supports initiatives designed to enhance the learning experience of both undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities; and fosters collaborations within and among institutions that support disciplinary innovation, foster practices of diversity and inclusion, and promote the social value of the humanities.
3. Humanities in Place – supports a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where our stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue.
4. Public Knowledge - supports the creation and preservation of the cultural and scholarly record—vast and ever-expanding—that documents society's complex, intertwined humanity. The program works with archives, presses, and a range of university, public, and other local, national, and global libraries that are foundational to knowledge production and distribution in culture and the humanities.