Barbara Crooker Caregiving Fellowship Grant

The Barbara Crooker Caregiving Fellowship, offered by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, supports artists caring for ill or disabled family members. This fully-funded residency provides a private bedroom, studio space, and meals in a collaborative environment. Artists from all disciplines are encouraged to apply, fostering diversity and creativity. Established by poet Barbara Crooker, the fellowship aims to empower caregivers by offering them dedicated time for their artistic pursuits, ensuring their vital contributions to the arts are recognized.

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA)
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts provides time and space for national and international writers, visual artists, and composers of talent and promise to bring forth their finest works, because the arts are vital, diversity is a strength, and creativity is essential.
Crooker first came to VCCA as a Fellow in 1990. She says, “In ‘real life,’ I’m the caregiver of my son, who has autism, and without VCCA, I’d never have written anything, let alone nine books. It took me so long to get a first book (25 years, but who’s counting). But it finally happened, and other books followed.”

Eligibility

Writers, visual artists, and composers who are caregivers to an ill or disabled spouse, an ill or disabled child, or another ill or disabled family memberVCCA encourages applications to Mt. San Angelo from artists representing the widest possible range of perspectives. Emerging and established artists may apply in the following disciplines: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, playwriting and screenwriting, performance, film and video, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, music composition, and cross-disciplinary art. Applicants who are enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, or doctoral programs are eligible to apply.Please apply in only one discipline that most closely relates to the project you are proposing to work on at VCCA supplemented by the work samples you will submit. Artists may be in residence at Mt. San Angelo only once every two years; returning Fellows must wait to reapply accordingly.

Ineligibility

Projects that involve pure academic scholarship are not accepted.Residencies may not be deferred beyond the scheduling period for which you were accepted.