NEA Arts Research Labs PS Application, FY2018 | NEAPS1704

Opportunity Information: Apply for NEAPS1704

The NEA Arts Research Labs PS Application, FY2018 (Funding Opportunity Number NEAPS1704; CFDA 45.024) is a discretionary funding opportunity from the National Endowment for the Arts that supports the creation and operation of NEA Research Labs through cooperative agreements. The core idea is to build transdisciplinary research partnerships, rooted in the social and behavioral sciences, that generate credible empirical evidence about the value and impact of the arts. These labs are meant to move beyond one-off studies by functioning as sustained centers of excellence that can continuously produce research outputs and practical insights that are useful not only to the arts field, but also to other sectors that interact with the arts, such as healthcare, education, and business or management.

Projects funded under this opportunity can begin no earlier than March 1, 2018, and may run for up to 24 months. The solicitation limits submissions to one proposal per organization, which means applicants need to consolidate their strongest concept and partnerships into a single, well-defined lab plan rather than submitting multiple competing ideas. The stated award ceiling is $150,000, and the original application closing date was July 18, 2017. While the notice references an expected number of awards, the specific number is not provided in the source data excerpt.

The program is structured around three NEA priority research domains, and each funded lab is expected to anchor itself in one of them. The first domain focuses on the arts, health, and social/emotional well-being, explicitly including both therapeutic approaches and benefits (for example, clinical or treatment-adjacent uses of the arts) and non-therapeutic approaches and benefits (for example, arts participation that supports well-being outside clinical contexts). The second domain centers on the arts, creativity, cognition, and learning, emphasizing how arts experiences may relate to thinking, skill development, and educational outcomes. The third domain examines the arts, entrepreneurship, and innovation, which points toward questions about how arts practices, organizations, and creative behaviors connect to enterprise creation, organizational performance, and innovative activity. Applicants are expected to define their own research agenda within one of these domains, implement a coherent research program, and produce reports that meaningfully advance understanding in that area.

A defining expectation of an NEA Research Lab is sustained productivity and responsiveness. Each lab is expected to develop a pipeline of projects or products even while conducting at least one major study during the period of performance. In practice, that implies a planned sequence of research activities and outputs, rather than a single deliverable at the end. In addition, labs must be prepared to handle ad hoc analytic or information requests from the NEA related to the lab's research agenda during the grant period. These requests are explicitly limited to analyses and information needs that do not require new data collection, which suggests the NEA may ask labs to interpret existing findings, reanalyze already-collected data, or produce targeted summaries that inform agency needs as the work unfolds.

Eligibility is broad and includes multiple types of public and private entities: state, county, city or township governments; special district governments; independent school districts; public and state-controlled institutions of higher education; private institutions of higher education; federally recognized Native American tribal governments; and nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) status other than higher education institutions. This range reflects the program's emphasis on cross-sector research partnerships and the idea that strong research hubs can be housed in different organizational settings, including universities, government entities, or mission-driven nonprofits capable of coordinating research activity.

Overall, the opportunity is designed to strengthen the evidence base around the arts by supporting research labs that operate as long-term knowledge generators. It prioritizes empirical work that can be communicated in substantive reports and that helps stakeholders inside and outside the arts understand how the arts intersect with health and well-being, learning and cognition, and entrepreneurship and innovation, while also ensuring funded labs can provide timely analytic support to the NEA when needed without initiating new data collection.

• The National Endowment for the Arts in the arts sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "NEA Arts Research Labs PS Application, FY2018" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 45.024.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2017-05-23.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2017-07-18. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $150,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education.

Apply for NEAPS1704

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