North Dakota Council on the Arts (NDCA) Awards $119,500 in Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeships for Fiscal Year 2026
BISMARCK, N.D. – North Dakota Council on the Arts (NDCA) has awarded $119,500.00 in grants through its Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program for Fiscal Year 2026, which runs from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. This year’s funding supports 68 artists in 36 communities (click button below for details), including 18 towns with fewer than 1,500 residents, helping keep cultural traditions alive across the state.
The Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program is designed to honor and encourage the preservation of North Dakota’s diverse living traditions. By providing funds of up to $4,500, the program allows master traditional artists to pass their skills and knowledge to apprentices on a one-to-one basis over an extended period. While masters may live outside North Dakota, all apprentices are North Dakota residents, ensuring these traditions continue to grow within the state.
This year’s apprenticeships showcase an extraordinary range of cultural heritage—from Ojibwe storytelling and dance, Sioux dentalium cape making, and Norwegian rosemaling to cowboy hat making, baroque acanthus woodcarving, Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi dance, saddle construction, and traditional Bhutanese drumming. Other funded apprenticeships will carry forward traditions such as Togolese drumming, Finnish weaving, fiddle restoration, needle felting, accordion music, Mexican folklorico dance, and mosaic Damascus bladesmithing.
Traditional and folk arts are shared expressions of identity rooted within a family, community, region, tribe, ethnic group, occupation, or religion over generations. They include craft, technical skill, music, dance, and ritual celebration, most often passed from one person to another informally—by word of mouth or example—rather than through formal schooling.
Grant awards may be used for a master artist’s instruction fee, supplies, and travel costs for the apprentice. Apprenticeships generally last between four and ten months, depending on the project plan.
Since its inception in the early 1980s, NDCA’s Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program has connected generations of artists, strengthened community bonds, and ensured that North Dakota’s cultural heritage remains vibrant. Over the past three decades, the program has grown significantly in both scope and participation, becoming one of the most robust of its kind in the nation. Its success is rooted in a commitment to mentoring youth, encouraging family members to learn together from non-family masters to create family-centered artistic traditions, and building networks of tradition-bearers practicing the same art form near one another.
For more information on NDCA’s Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, along with all other grant programs, please visit NDCA's Grants at a Glance page or call 701-328-7590.
FY26 Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeships
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North Dakota Council on the Arts is the state agency responsible for the support, development, and preservation of the arts throughout North Dakota and is funded by the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.