The Kenneth Rainin Foundation awarded $2,300,000 in grants this year to support medical research for Inflammatory Bowel Disease; dance, theater and film in the San Francisco Bay Area; and early literacy programs in Oakland, California. The Foundation is pleased to support the important work our health, education and arts grantees who reflect our core values of innovation, collaboration and connection.

Arts

In December 2011, the Foundation awarded $594,250 in grants to support the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. This grant cycle was designed to address the Foundation’s mission to enhance quality of life by enabling inspiration through the arts.

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation supports dance and theater organizations that display artistic promise and vision and bring vital performances and programs to the public. In addition, in collaboration with the San Francisco Film Society, the Foundation created a grantmaking program to support Bay Area filmmakers in the production of narrative features with social justice themes.

Dance & Theater Grants

Visibility Awards in Dance:

• Amy Seiwert's Imagery for SKETCH: New Works 2, The Women Choreographers. World premieres by local and national choreographers with a mission to expand the definition of ballet by exploding preconceptions of what ballet is and can be
• Dance/USA for scholarships to enable 35 Bay Area dance artists and administrators to attend the 2012 Annual Conference in San Francisco
• Dancers' Group for Niagara Falling, a new site-specific dance and video performance in San Francisco’s Central Market corridor by choreographer Jo Kreiter, with filmmakers David and Hi-Jin Hodge as part of the ONSITE series
• Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater for Botany’s Breath, a site-specific contemporary dance work with music and video to premiere at the Conservatory of Flowers, a spectacular living museum of rare and beautiful tropical plants that will utilize the Victorian edifice as provocateur, stage, musical instrument, and projection screen
• Headlands Center for the Arts for the Dance/Choreography Artist in Residence Program in 2012, awarding 3 artists residencies of up to 10 weeks each in Headlands’ remarkable campus of historic buildings in a National Park
• Hope Mohr Dance for Reluctant Light, a new dance by choreographer Hope Mohr that explores emotional surrender through vivid imagery and formal inquiry into the dancing body accompanied by cellist Helen Money and featuring a set by designer Zakary Zide
• Jess Curtis/Gravity for Performance Research Experiment #2, a new work by choreographer Jess Curtis in collaboration with renowned French/German dance and circus performer Jörg Müller and Iranian neuroscientist Ida Mommenejad that will examine the collaboration/collision of science and art – and the relationship of live art to the body – by measuring specific physical reactions experienced by audience members throughout a sequence of performative events
• ODC Theater for the Opportunity Fund that will support self-producing artists through ODC Theater's open access rental program

Visibility Awards in Theater:

• Campo Santo for Alleluia, The Road, a new play by MacArthur Genius Award Winning writer Luis Alfaro, inspired by August Strindberg's The Road To Damascus, exploring 7 stops on California's Highway 99 from Disneyland to the Golden Gate Bridge
• Cutting Ball Theater for the New Experimental Plays Initiative in 2011-12. World premiere productions of NEPI commissioned plays Tenderloin and Tontlawald; a new translation of Strindberg’s The Black Glove; the early development of Paul Walsh’s new translations of five Strindberg plays; and two new plays by Bay Area playwrights Christopher Chen and Anthony Clarvoe
• Just Theater for the New Play Lab, plays developed by five Bay Area playwrights paired with five directors from conception to first draft
• Playwrights Foundation for the Resident Playwrights Initiative: Artistic Career Development and Production Fund, to support the career development of exceptional Bay Area Playwrights and provide a production fund for Residents' work
• San Francisco International Arts Festival for the festival's online marketing and social media strategic plan
• The African and African American Performing Arts Coalition for Word Becomes Flesh, a provocative multi-player work of theater inspired by hip-hop culture, personal truths, and passionate reflections by artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• The Custom Made Theatre Company for Little Brother, the world premiere of Josh Costello's adaptation of the NY Times bestseller by Cory Doctorow

Our next Visibility Awards Letter of Inquiry period opens January 4, 2012. This first stage of the application process is designed to take under an hour to complete online. The final date for LOI submission is January 25, 2012. On February 17, 2012, selected applicants will be invited to submit a full proposal.

Grant awards range in size from $5,000 - $20,000. Grants are project-based only.

Click here to review our guidelines

SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, in partnership with The San Francisco Film Society, supports filmmakers in the production of narrative features that through plot, character, theme and/or setting significantly explore human and civil rights, anti-discrimination, gender issues, sexual identity and other urgent social justice issues of our time. The grants are awarded twice annually to filmmakers for narrative feature films with social justice themes that will have significant economic or professional impact on the Bay Area filmmaking community. Between 2009 and 2013 the SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants will award nearly $2.5 million, including more than $1 million awarded in the first six grant rounds.

Awards in Film:

• Lance Edmands & Kyle Martin - Bluebird - Production. In the frozen woods of an isolated Maine logging town, one woman’s tragic mistake shatters the community balance, resulting in profound and unexpected consequences.
• Eric Escobar - One Good Thing - Screenwriting. A jaded and bitter locksmith spends his days locking families out of their foreclosed homes. When a morning lockout turns up the abandoned child of a long-lost friend, his cynicism is put in check as he races to find the missing parents.
• Ian Hendrie & Jyson McLean - Mercy Road - Screenwriting. Based on true events, Mercy Road traces the political and spiritual odyssey of a small-town Christian housewife as she slowly turns from a peaceful pro-life activist to an underground militant willing to commit violence and murder in the name of God.
• Chris Mason Johnson - Test - Production. The year is 1985. The youngest, skinniest and most mocked member of San Francisco’s new contemporary ballet company begins a friendship with a brilliant dancer with a bad boy reputation in the same troupe. As lurid headlines threaten a gay quarantine, the two friends navigate a world full of risk that is also full of promise.
• Oden Roberts & Azura Skye - Rosie Got Her Gun - Production. Following a series of arrests, a troubled young woman struggling to avoid prison time is visited by an opportunistic Army recruiter.

The KRF/SFFS Filmmaking Grant Letter of Inquiry period opens January 10, 2012 and closes on February 8, 2012.

Click here for specific eligibility requirements

Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco - Free screening at A.C.T.

Stage Left had its Bay Area premiere at the 34th annual Mill Valley Film Festival in October and we are thrilled to announce the San Francisco premiere will be held at the American Conservatory Theater on Sunday, January 29 at 6:30 p.m. The screening is a special event for HUMOR ABUSE, a unique play by Lorenzo Pisoni about his upbringing as the youngest member of the Bay Area's own Pickle Family Circus. Please join us for a pre-screening conversation with A.C.T. Artistic Director, Carey Perloff and filmmaker Austin Forbord and a post-screening mixer in Fred's Columbia Room, located in A.C.T.'s lower lobby. Visit the A.C.T. website to reserve your free tickets.

A.C.T. is offering a Stage Left discount for HUMOR ABUSE

• $45 orchestra / $35 mezzanine prices
• Enter promo-code CIRCUS when ordering tickets
• To purchase: visit www.act-sf.org
• Tickets can also be ordered by phone at 415.749.2228

IMPORTANT: Tickets subject to availability. Offer is good for all performances AT THIS TIME, although as performances start to sell, certain dates will drop off. Order early to guarantee dates and seats.

Click here to visit the Stage Left website

Health

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation supports out-of-the-box, innovative research projects that are potentially transformative to our efforts to diagnose, treat and/or cure Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

KRF Innovator Award

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced its 2012 Innovator Awards Program for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

Letters of Inquiry (LOI) will be accepted online January 15 - February 15, 2012. The one-page LOI must include the basic idea and the central experiment. A biosketch will also be required. The Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board will determine which applicants will be invited to submit a full application.

Click here to review our guidelines

KRF Innovations Symposium

The Foundation also announced its inaugural 2012 Innovations Symposium entitled New Insights In Human Evolution, which will be held on Friday, July 20, 2012 at The Four Seasons Hotel Chicago. This unique, first-of-its kind, one-day symposium will bring together preeminent investigators in human evolution, genetics, microbiology and the environment to describe and explore how advances in each of these fields can promote out-of-the-box thinking and foster breakthroughs in our understanding of mechanisms of disease and therapy for ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.

Using inflammatory bowel disease as a lens, senior leaders in each discipline will discuss their work, with ample time dedicated to audience participation to draw connections across these distinct but related disciplines and set new directions for the future.

Guest speakers include:

• Bonnie Bassler, Ph.D. – Princeton University
• Anna Di Rienzo, Ph.D. – University of Chicago
• Paul Ewald, Ph.D. – University of Louisville
• Christopher Kuzawa, Ph.D. – Northwestern University
• Stephen Rappaport, Ph.D. – UC Berkeley
• Stephen Stearns, Ph.D. – Yale University

Early registration is recommended as seating is limited to 100.

Click here to register

Education

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation supports emergent and early literacy programs in Oakland, California and related research at a national level. The Foundation considers proposals by invitation only from public non-profit institutions or government institutions whose focus is emergent or early literacy-related.

Click here to review our guidelines

KENNETH RAININ FOUNDATION IN THE NEWS

San Francisco Film Society and Kenneth Rainin Foundation Announce Recipients of Fall 2011 SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants

San Francisco, CA – The San Francisco Film Society and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation announce the five winning projects in the sixth round of SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants.

View press release

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation Announces 2012 Innovations Symposium - New Insights In Human Evolution and IBD

Oakland, CA - The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced today its inaugural 2012 Innovations Symposium, which will be held on Friday, July 20, 2012 at The Four Seasons Hotel Chicago.

View press release

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation Announces 2012 Innovator Awards Program $100,000 Grants for Transformative IBD Research Projects

Oakland, CA - The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announces its 2012 Innovator Awards Program for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The program supports "out-of-the-box" innovative research projects that are potentially transformative to the Foundation's efforts to diagnose, treat and/or cure IBD.

View press release

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The Kenneth Rainin Foundation is a private family foundation that funds inspiring and world-changing work. We are dedicated to enhancing quality of life by promoting equitable access to a baseline of literacy, enabling inspiration through the arts and supporting medical research that will lead to relief for those with chronic disease. The Foundation will focus its efforts on the San Francisco Bay Area and specific medical issues and will utilize its networks, resources, and commitment to socially responsible practices to support innovation, collaboration and connection.