NYU-Poly awarded a Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation grant

Polytechnic Institute of NYU’s Betaville, an online platform for collaborative urban design, is among the 18 winners of the Rockefeller Foundation’s $2.7 million 2009 NYC Cultural Innovation Fund Competition announced yesterday. Carl Skelton, director of NYU-Poly’s Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC) and its integrated digital media degree programs, is Betaville’s artist/principal investigator.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s President Dr. Judith Rodin said of the winning projects: “In today’s economy, our artists and communities need support to continue to build an innovative creative sector that provokes us to react, question, and learn.”

The Rockefeller Foundation started the New York City Cultural Innovation Fund in 2007, awarding two-year grants, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000, for “groundbreaking initiatives that enrich the City’s cultural life and help to ensure the continued economic strength and diversity of the City’s creative sector.” 

Three prominent leaders from the fields of innovation and the arts served as advisors to the Fund: Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator, Museum of art & Design and former President of the Studio Museum in Harlem; David Thorpe, Director of Innovation, Institute for State effectiveness; and Andrew Zolli, Founder, Z + Partners and Curator, annual Pop!Tech Conference. More than 500 diverse projects were submitted to this year’s competition.

Visit the Rockefeller Foundation’s web site for a full list of 2009 NYC Cultural Innovation Fund Competition winners. You can also download the full-page congratulations ad featured in the October 16 New York Times.