Coming Soon! 2012 Stipend Application Opens in June

For eight years, the Macktez Summer Stipend has helped us engage on a more personal level with some of the creative people we work with every day. Many people we know have to put their personal projects aside while they devote time and energy to their clients’ goals. Without the opportunity or motivation, their personal projects may languish for months or years. So we try to provide some assistance to get them across the finish line.

The Stipend is not open only to clients — it’s open to all. And it’s been a pleasure for us to get to know and reward the work of so many creative people we may not have met any other way.

To honor the success of this experience, we are increasing the Stipend this year to $1,000.

Applications will be available on this web page on (or around) June 18, 2012. Finalists will be announced at the end of July, and our recipient will be selected just a few weeks later.

If you’d like to hear from us as we hit each of the Stipend targets, or would like to receive one of our mailings, you can add your name to our list here or subscribe to our RSS feed.

You can also review our previous recipients and their projects below.

Home > Stipend

The Macktez Summer Stipend is a development grant to encourage one of the many imaginative people we meet and work with every day to finish their summer project. We evaluate applications on three simple criteria: originality, relevance, and conviction.

Stipend Archive

  • 2011 — Congratulations to Mary Jeys
    Mary's project — to document her Brooklyn Torch exchanges — is part community engagement, part economic anthropology, and part technological rescue.
  • 2010 — Congratulations to Jack Shaw
    Jack received the 2010 stipend for his vision to create a waste-free product made out of its own packing material. The result will be The Light Box, a floor lamp or wall sconce incorporating its own packaging into the design and construction.
  • 2009 — Congratulations to Zoe Fraade-Blanar
    Zoe Fraade-Blanar received the 2009 stipend to map the difference between the news people are searching for and what journalists are publishing. Beautiful visual representations can show editors which hot topics are underrepresented by news sources, giving them the opportunity to generate readership by tapping unmet demand. The result was Current: A News Project her thesis project at NYU's Tisch ITP. Current is now being used at a large (unnamed) newspaper to help editors determine what stories to move to the front page of their website. Zoe teaches at NYU School of Journalism and will be an Adjunct Professor at NYU's ITP program starting fall 2011.
  • 2008 — Congratulations to Nicole Kenney for Before I Die I Want To
    Nicole and partner KS continue to grow the Polaroid project. Since the summer that they won the stipend, they have taken the project to India as well as hospice. Nicole is finishing a 1-year program in Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography. She has an exhibition opening at ICP June 24, 2011 called "living in love, living in loss," an autobiographical exploration of the impermanence of marriage, which will be available on her website, nicolekenney.com, sometime after its opening.
  • 2007 — Congratulations to Andrew Sloat for A More Perfect Union
    Andrew recently finished working on a series of advertisements for the Ford Fiesta, an opportunity that came about largely as a result of the project Macktez helped fund. He still teaches at RISD and continues to work on videos about the constitution, as well as keeping a roster of clients here in the city.
  • 2006 — Christopher Allen and UnionDocs
    Christopher Allen and UnionDocs are putting the final touches on a collaborative work called "Documenting Mythologies" that was premiered at the Museum of Modern Art last year. It is a collection of experimental essay films inspired by the writing of Roland Barthes, embedded in the narrative of a Fourth of July road trip. It will be set to tour art spaces and micro-cinemas in the fall. They are also looking forward to the public launch of their next collaborative documentary focusing on the neighborhood in which UnionDocs is part. They are launching this three-year project with a series of local events, including a Rooftop Films Screening this summer.
  • 2005 — Daniel Marr, Chinatown
    First of all, Daniel's changed his surname back to the one he was born with: Maher. Daniel is writing songs for his seventh album. Hear more of his music on MySpace.