Ashley Ferro-Murray’s conviction that “no one knows better than artists what they need,” based on her own personal experience as a working artist, guides her approach to her role as program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Foundation. In addition to placing trust in dancers and choreographers, the multi-pronged approach Ferro-Murray has developed to support the dance ecosystem focuses on funding individual artists as well as performing arts institutions and advocates, and creating synergy with other organizations and industries. Her 2016 PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on the intersections among choreography, media, and technology informs Ferro-Murray’s particular interest in projects that highlight the importance of dance in the development of more equitable technology.
Ferro-Murray with the Mozilla Foundation’s Ziyaad Bhorat, left, and the comedian/poet ALOK at a conversation on artists and technology. Photo by Chloe Jackman Studios, Courtesy DDF.
I joined the Doris Duke Foundation as a dancer, choreographer, and curator, and rely on the skills that dancing taught me: discipline, follow-through, and resilience. I had spent a decade in my 20s trying to decide how I could make a living as an artist. Working as a choreographer gave me the ability to build complex solutions to world problems and to communicate those solutions to wide audiences.
I also have lived experience of seeking grants in our field. In my 30s I was a curator and producer of dance and theater commissions at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There, I worked very closely with artists and companies like Maria Hassabi, Kinetic Light, jaamil olawale kosoko, Su Wen-Chi, and Sage Whitson. I produced projects that pushed our expectations of what dance looks and feels like. In my current role, I get to talk about my experiences as a dancer, choreographer, and curator when I’m meeting with partners who might not know about the nuanced needs of dance artists.
These experiences taught me that artists don’t have reliable options for employment protection, health insurance, retirement accounts, and the list goes on. This made me curious about funding, and why grants seem like the best way to make new artwork, but often put artists in a position of applying year after year, and only a very small percentage receive that grant. It’s a laborious process that can take artists away from their craft and that often does not provide what artists really need.
Ashley Ferro-Murray. Courtesy DDF.
We know that artists are creative and find ways to make do, but this also means that the dance world has long relied on a scarcity mentality. I’m interested in locating and funding resilient models for the future as well as legacy models that center and value the labor of the artist. One way the Doris Duke Foundation is doing this is by combining our grant making capacity with other resources like marketing and communications skills.
One of my first tasks at the Doris Duke Foundation was to design a new strategy area focused on technology and the performing arts. Dance and technology have been historicized as opposed from one another: During the industrial revolution, a lot of dancing mimicked machine movement—like the Tiller Girls. At the same time, Isadora Duncan deployed dance and choreography to reassert the emotional effort and changing rhythms of humans. But this narrative that pits dancing against technology comes from a white Western context. We can look to histories of Afrofuturism, cyberfeminism and Disability activism to locate counternarratives: They all use contemporary technology to liberate bodies. John Bernd made Surviving Love and Death to take control of the impact that early AIDS medicine had on his body. I’m inspired by the ways that dancers like Raja Feather Kelly and Nile Harris treat digital culture in their work.
Right now, I’m most excited about our grant programs that place trust in artists. The Doris Duke Artist Awards give $525,000 of unrestricted support to individual artists. “Unrestricted” means artists are able to use the money to build a social safety net and to access housing security, or address deferred medical care, or pay down debt. Awardees can access an additional $25,000 retirement-savings incentive as well as networking support with other artists, plus tax- and financial-planning resources.
I’m also excited the Doris Duke Foundation knows we can’t do everything on our own. We’ve been creating external partnerships like Artists Make Technology, our new endeavor with the Mozilla Foundation, and in partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
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