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Program Timeline
Application Opens
Note that all applicants are required to have a brief phone conversation with Jerome staff in order to receive the link to apply.
Informational Webinar
Join Jerome staff for a webinar to review the program and application process and stay for a Q&A. Register in advance for the live event or to be notified when the recording is available.
Deadline for required phone call with Jerome staff
Schedule the required phone conversation in advance.
Phone or Zoom appointments available for application questions
Phone or Zoom appointments available for application questions (schedule in advance).
Application Closes
Late applications are not accepted.
Notification of grant status
Public announcement of grantees
Timeline to receive grant funds
Informational Webinar and Video Resources
Informational Webinar: Thursday, January 23, 2025, 5–6 pm Central
Join Jerome staff for a webinar to review the program and application process and stay for a Q&A. Register in advance for the live event or to be notified when the recording is available.
Work Sample and CV Guidance Videos to be posted no later than January 25
Work Samples: Learn recommended practices for work sample submissions for this program and how you might apply them to other grant programs.
CV: Get tips and ideas for creating a CV that helps the panel understand your work and experiences.
Born in Saigon and rooted in Minneapolis, Truc Anh (TA, pronouns she/hers) is a queer, Southeast Asian artist/maker, and racial justice grantmaker. She is passionate about creating the conditions for transformative change that centers racial, gender, and disability justice, especially at the intersections of LGBTQIA+ and Southeast Asian communities. In her previous role at Borealis Philanthropy, TA supported the Racial Equity to Accelerate Change (REACH) Fund which supported racial equity practitioners/capacity builders in the nonprofit sector.
As a 1.5 generation immigrant by way of war, Truc Anh is powered by stories of resistance and resilience. She practices art for healing and for joy. In her spare time, TA can be found outside in her garden, exploring the North Shore, cooking with her friends, or reading. Truc Anh graduated from Carleton College with a degree in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Women & Gender Studies.
Nell Augustin is a queer Haitian-American artist development executive and independent producer advocating for creative freedom, risk, and redefining investment.
Granting over $1.5MM in four years as Director of Original Voices Documentary Films at NBCUniversal, she has proudly supported award-winning nonfiction and hybrid films such as I Didn’t See You There (SFF22), Mija (SFF22), Hummingbirds (BERLINALE23), Bad Press (SFF23), Unseen (HOT DOCS 23), Union (SFF24), Homegrown (VENICE24), Ghetto Children (NOFF24) and Love Birds (forthcoming 2025). Nell was named a 2021 DOC NYC Documentary New Leader and selected for the 2022 Rockwood Documentary Leaders Fellowship supported by the Ford Foundation. Born in New York City to parents from Minnesota and Haiti, she splits her time between Brooklyn and St. Paul with her fiancé and dog.
Nell has film programmed for indie documentary film festivals including True/False, CIFF, and Big Sky, led filmmaker labs and seminars for BlackStar Projects, Firelight Media, and UnionDocs, and served on festival juries and funding panels for BAVC, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Brooklyn Arts Council, Chicago Media Project, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Creative Capital, Define American, Doc Society, Duke University’s DocX Development Lab, Film Independent, The Gotham, IDA, Indie Memphis, LEF Foundation’s Moving Image Fund, Mezcla Media, NEA, New Orleans Film Festival, NYU Production Lab, Open City, Palm Springs ShortFest, POV, SFFILM, and Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and New Frontier Story Labs. Nell is a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Fordham University with a degree in Anthropology and Africana Studies.
Andrea Brown joined the Jerome Foundation in 2016. She came to the Jerome Foundation after five years at the Walker Art Center, where she was Associate Director of Strategic Marketing, and prior to that Associate Director of Digital Marketing and Marketing Manager. She worked in the New York office of the American Academy in Berlin before taking a 7-year detour into software at Marketing Bridge/Gage Marketing where she was Lead Account Supervisor.
Andrea has a B.A. in American Studies from Smith College.
The Program
The MN Filmmaker Mentorship grant program averages 10 applications per round.
We anticipate giving up to 3 grants in this round.
The Foundation has supported film projects since its founding in 1964. You can learn more about recent grantees or see all past grantees on our website. The grantee search can also filter by year and by Minnesota and/or New York City.
Eligibility
No, it is too early for you to apply. We hope that you will consider applying after completing and publicly screening your first project if you are then still eligible and interested in support.
Interested applicants must schedule a call with Jerome staff to assess eligibility.
You’ll also be asked to complete an eligibility questionnaire before you can access the application. Completing that questionnaire will clarify whether you meet our eligibility requirements.
Additionally, you should consider your mentorship and production timeline. You will need to receive the funds and schedule your mentorship activities in the 18-month grant period from November 2025 through April 2027.
This program’s highest priority is to support directors in their 2nd-5th year. While directors working in their 5th-10th year are eligible, they will be a lower priority for the panel unless they can explain why they should still be considered at the earliest part of the early career range. Such directors should look carefully at the MN Film Production Grant program before deciding whether to apply for this Development grant. Directors may apply to one program or the other but not to both.
We encourage you to review Jerome’s focus and review criteria (available in the Program and Application Information document) to see if those align with your approach to filmmaking.
The Foundation, in specific circumstances, is intentionally flexible to a degree with directors who may be past their 5th year and still consider themselves needing a mentorship program. The number of opportunities afforded to directors may differ significantly based on discipline, race/ethnicity, class, gender, physical ability, and geography, among other factors. We also recognize that some directors may experience enormous success and move past early career status well before their 5th year. If you have received significant support in the past or if you are past your 5th year, you should consult Jerome program staff no later than March 28, 2025 to verify your eligibility before you submit an application.
Yes, if you have established your primary residency in Minnesota, are still a resident at the application deadline, and plan to remain a resident in Minnesota through April 2027.
Anyone with an SSN (social security number) or an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) is eligible to apply—including DACA recipients and most types of VISA recipients. Individuals who do not have an SSN or an ITIN are not eligible to apply.
Current Minnesota filmmakers who plan to relocate to New York City before the application deadline should apply in the New York City Film Production program. There is not a Filmmaker Mentorship program for New York City filmmakers. If you are doing an extended residency or location shoot that impacts residency, please schedule an eligibility call with Jerome program staff.
Only film directors may submit applications and receive funding from the Foundation. While grantees may use funds for productions costs, fees to actors, producers, writers and crew, etc., the applicant must be the film director/s. Actors, producers, writers and crew may not submit their own applications.
No. The program only supports independent work directed by the applicant. This type of work cannot be proposed as the basis of a project for which funding is requested.
No. This program’s exclusive focus is moving image media, which includes narrative, experimental, documentary, and animation.
No. The Filmmaker Mentorship grant is awarded only once to a director. If you receive a Mentorship grant, you may apply to the Production grant program in a future round with the same project with which you engaged in the Mentorship grant, provided reporting requirements are complete and you are still in production with the project. You may apply for one or the other of these opportunities, but not both, within the same program year.
No. This is an individual artist grant program, and the application must come from you, not from an organization. If you are selected for a grant, funds must be distributed directly to you as an individual or directly to your single-proprietor LLC (if relevant).
No. Film directors who have received a MN Filmmaker Mentorship grant, a MN or NYC Film Production grant, a Jerome@Camargo grant, or a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship grant are not eligible to apply.
The Application
No. Only work samples from projects that you directed may be submitted. If you do not have at least one completed project that you have directed, you are not yet eligible to apply for Jerome support.
While Submittable allows you to exceed recommended word counts, you are strongly discouraged from doing so. We require panels to review only the amount of material captured in the suggested limit fields. Past panels have reacted positively to concise writing. Panels have noted that “the pitch” is an important professional skill.
No. You may submit only one application per round, regardless of the number of projects you may be working on in the potential grant period. If you submit an application as an individual, you cannot apply separately with a co-directing team, and no members of a co-directing team be a part of more than one application. If you submit more than one application or if your name appears as an applicant in more than one application, all applications you submitted and in which you are named will be deemed ineligible.
If you apply in the MN Filmmaker Development program, you may not also apply to the MN Film Production program. Both applications will be deemed ineligible.
No. The review process begins immediately after the deadline and cannot accommodate changes to your application.
No. Panels are asked to assess based on the work samples and materials as provided in the application. We believe the benefit these letters may offer is outweighed by the burden they place on you to request them, references to write them, and staff or applicants to ensure they have been submitted.
Only if you are a finalist and discussed by the full panel. Because of the time it takes panelists to review all applicants, asking them to provide written critiques for each application would impose an enormous burden on their time.
At the panel meeting, staff take notes during discussions and subsequently provide feedback to the finalists who are discussed (if you choose to make a follow-up appointment to receive that feedback).
We will not, however, be able to offer non-finalists feedback on their applications beyond general trends of what made applications more or less competitive.
We know that the film community can be a small one, and we are diligent in ensuring that no one with a conflict of interest is part of the decision-making process on an application with whom they have professional or personal relationships.
In assembling a panel, we work hard to capture the diversity of the field, in terms of identity, aesthetic expression, genre and form, understanding of and relationship with early career artists, and geographic location.
At the same time, we want to ensure your confidence in the panels and their qualifications to consider artistic work. We therefore periodically post a comprehensive list of panelists we have used for past selection processes in multiple programs on our website, even while we do not link a specific panelist to a specific program or year. The panel composition changes annually, so knowing the identity of the panel in a given year does not provide insight into who will serve in the next round.
Panels are constructed to include leaders in film based in Minnesota, as well as those working within the national sphere. All panels are constructed to ensure that no single race or ethnicity constitutes a majority of the panel.
In addition to the listing of panelists, the roster of the grantees provides information about the filmmaker and projects supported by this grant program.
Budgets
This grant prioritizes self-designed mentorship activities for early career filmmakers and should not be considered supplemental production funding. Budgets submitted with your application need to outline how you plan to use the funds to advance your skills as a director. Mentorship activities can inform and enhance your project and expenses are not intended solely for production. Expenses included in your budget must tie to mentorship and align with what you intend to do to advance your skills. Equipment purchases are capped at 25% of the total amount requested.
The Foundation requires you to schedule a phone conversation with Jerome staff to confirm eligibility prior to applying.