Early Career Artist Grant: Professional Development

With generous support from the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, ACC has established three grant opportunities, available exclusively to members of our Early Career Artist Program. The American Craft Council provides innovative programs that support craft-centered livelihoods, including initiatives designed to meet the needs of artists as they build their careers.

Photo by Andrew Ruiz

Meet the awardees.

The Professional Development Grant provides up to $2,500 in funding for participation in professional development opportunities and activities that build skills for creative entrepreneurs. Examples of professional development activities include, but are not limited to: conferences, professional development workshops, professional or business coaching, membership to organizations that offer professional development opportunities, and other activities that enhance professional knowledge.

You are now entering a filterable feed of Awardees.

  • Brian Millspaw

    Brian Millspaw is a self-taught furniture maker based in rural southwestern New York. He crafts solid wood chairs that offer support, comfort, and welcome. By blending traditional handwork with modern engineering, He creates chairs that are not only functional seating but objects of connection.

  • Deb Reutter

    Deb received a Professional Development grant to continue her work with Larissa Loden, a Certified Professional Coach through iPEC, and local entrepreneur. Larissa has been Deb’s business coach since June 2024. Deb says “She has been a driving force of my business savvy and growth, and I intend to continue learning and growing with her.”

  • Evangelina Roa

    Brooklyn-based Mexican-American artist Evangelina Roa transforms discarded textiles and found objects into tactile figurative works. Bridging her Chicago roots with New York City’s energy, her intuitive process explores identity and memory. Evangelina’s expressive, layered narratives repurpose the overlooked, weaving culture and curiosity into every thread of her evocative art.

  • Nicolas Der

    Nic Der is a leatherworker and designer residing and working in Catskill, New York. He combines traditional leather techniques from luxury bag-making and cordswaining with digital fabrication to create minimalist, functional, and sculptural work that explores themes of mass-production, domesticity, the human body, his Chinese-American heritage, and queer identity.

  • Niki Leist

    Niki received a Professional Development Grant to attend the New Approach School for Jewelers’ Stone Setting Comprehensive. The comprehensive workshop is an intensive, eight-hour-a-day, five-day program that will teach Niki a wide variety of technical skills. The Comprehensive will allow her to advance the efficiency of her business and the quality of her work by enabling her to diversify her fine jewelry line and pursue new business opportunities.

  • Valentina Miska

    Valentina Miksa is a glass artist whose work is evocative of the play she had as a child. Revisiting these experiences through an adult perspective, she creates work that responds to and critiques the connotations of gendered play and the roles she was encouraged to embody as a child.