Projects, Initiatives, Partnerships that are for a time, but not forever
A cohort of documentarians working to gather cultural & heritage stories in our region meets bi-monthly for exchanges, skill sharing, and conversation. The gatherings aim to strengthen a network of regional narrators to build narrative power and amplify stories about cultural expressions, rituals, occupational culture, and community-building initiatives in the greater Southwest and US-Mexico border region.
What the River Knows: Stories of Culture, Place, and Practice along the Santa Cruz River is a series of documentary and participatory interventions to uplift and celebrate the Santa Cruz River as a living entity and source of practical knowledge, regional identity, and cultural memory. The project uses listening sessions, fieldwork expeditions, and multimedia story productions to explore folklife and cultural traditions in communities along the river in Pima and Santa Cruz counties.
The Master-Apprentice Artist Award provides direct financial support for highly skilled traditional and heritage-based artists living in Arizona to pass on their artform, culture, and heritage to apprentice learners. The award is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
BorderLore is SFA’s free online journal dedicated to documenting, sharing, and elevating folklife in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Published six times per year and reaching more than 9,000 subscribers, the journal covers the full range of living cultural practice in our region: foodways, music and dance, visual and verbal arts, ceremony, occupational traditions, ecology, and the borderlands experience in all its complexity.
BorderLore articles have been assigned as classroom reading at the University of Arizona and cited by journalists, researchers, artists, and policy advocates as a trusted record of regional culture.
The End of Life: Continuum (EOL) projects share cultural knowledge about traditions, expressions, and practices associated with end of life, grief, mourning and death in Southern Arizona’s folk, ethnic, occupational, faith-based and alternative communities.
VozFrontera was a program for youth engagement, leadership, and local arts incubation in Nogales, Arizona. It offers documentary arts mentoring with youth, artist- and scholar in-residence programs, and co-working lab space for young leaders and entrepreneurs.