New York, NY, March 4, 2020—The Vilcek Foundation has issued an open call for applications for the 2021 Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Filmmaking. Awarded annually, the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise honor foreign-born artists living and working in the United States who have demonstrated significant achievement in their early career. Three prizes will be bestowed to selected candidates in the spring of 2021. Each recipient of a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking will receive a commemorative award and an unrestricted cash prize of $50,000, intended to support them at a crucial point in their career.

“As leaders in the arts, we have a responsibility to promote diversity by making space, providing access, and amplifying those voices that need to be heard,” said Rick Kinsel, president of the Vilcek Foundation. “The Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Filmmaking support artists whose work represents a diversity of perspectives. Their innovative and powerful approaches to the art of filmmaking make a distinct and lasting impression on the medium, and on audiences in the United States and around the world.”

Immigrant filmmakers living and working in the United States are invited to apply for a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking. Foreign-born persons working in filmmaking in any capacity—as directors, producers, cinematographers, writers, editors, or animators—are encouraged to apply. Filmmakers working in a diversity of genres and formats, including narrative, documentary, short-format, long-format, digital, or experimental, are eligible to submit their work for consideration for a Creative Promise Prize.

To be eligible for a Creative Promise Prize in Filmmaking, candidates must have been born outside of the United States, be living and working in the United States, and be 38 years of age or younger as of December 31, 2020 (born on or after January 1, 1982).

Eligible candidates must submit an application form, a resume or curriculum vitae, a portfolio or list of completed works, three short personal essays, and proof of immigration status. Recipients of DACA are welcome to apply.

Applications will be accepted from March 2 to June 10, 2020 June 17, 2020, 5 p.m. EDT.

A panel of distinguished experts identified by the Vilcek Foundation will evaluate each applicant’s accomplishments, including the quality and creativity of the work submitted, the clarity of each applicant’s stated personal and professional purpose, and the potential for greater impact on the genre of filmmaking and on society at large.

The three selected winners will be notified in late summer of 2020, and the winners will be announced to the public in the fall of 2020. All of the recipients of the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Filmmaking will be honored at the Vilcek Foundation Awards Gala in spring 2021. Three Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise will also be awarded in biomedical science. Since the inception of the Vilcek Foundation Prize Program, over $5 million has been awarded in prizes to immigrants from around the world. For more information about the Vilcek Foundation Prize Program, visit www.vilcek.org.