Exploratory Travel Award Grant

Exploratory Travel Award Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Carl And Marilynn Thoma Foundation
Amount: Up to US $5,000
Last Updated: September 19, 2025

Summary

The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation offers the Exploratory Travel Award, granting up to $5,000 to PhD students for travel in Latin America. This initiative aims to support the development of innovative research projects by allowing students to connect with local scholars and visit archives and museums. The award is particularly focused on early-career PhD students, especially those from Europe and Latin America, and encourages contributions to the history of painting and sculpture in viceregal South America.

Overview

Our Mission The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation recognizes that the arts and education enhance lives and communities. We make art collection-related grants, as well as lending and exhibiting our own collection. We focus our education funding on the rural Southwest, primarily offering scholarships to students in the greater Texas panhandle. Through these giving programs, we strive to foster leadership, innovation, and equal opportunity. Our History Inspired to make contributions with a wide-ranging yet personal impact, Carl and Marilynn Thoma founded the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation in 2014 to distinguish their initiatives in and support of the visual arts. In 2021, the Foundation was renamed the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation to more broadly reflect its expanded philanthropic efforts and initiatives, including the Thoma Scholars Program, which aims to strengthen community, leadership, and education initiatives in under-resourced and rural areas. Exploratory Travel Award The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation is pleased to offer travel awards of up to $5,000 to PhD students who want to travel to Latin America to visit archives, museums, and art collections and connect with local scholars. Exploratory Travel Awards will enable students to develop viable and innovative research projects for future application to pre-doctoral fellowships, including the Marilynn Thoma Pre-doctoral Fellowship in Art of the Spanish Americas. The Exploratory Travel Award is intended to fund travel of 1-2 months in Latin America as preparation for more extensive archival and collections-based research in the future.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. Applicants must be enrolled in an accredited PhD program. This funding is intended only for early-career PhD students; for example, in Europe, this generally refers to students in their first year of study, and in the United States, it means pre-candidacy. Individuals in Europe and Latin America, where comparable sources of external funding are less available, are strongly encouraged to apply.

Ineligibility

Students whose institutions offer similar preliminary travel funding are not eligible for the award.