We’re now accepting applications for the 2011-2012 Open Media Grants! Applications are due on Sunday, November 13th. Click to download the application.




But what is the OMG?


Inspire Media annually offers the Open Media Grants to allow Northwestern students of all academic backgrounds and training to explore issues they’re passionate about through socially conscious media. Both the format and message are up to you. Whether you’re sharing your talents, educating your peers, investigating a community problem or doing all three at once – the grants will help you make media that matters.


We aim to provide the support and resources to anybody with an idea. It doesn’t matter if you’re in McCormick or Medill, an English major or an econ star, a veteran filmmaker or a burgeoning artist. Applicants can apply for up to $500 for a single project from a pool of $2,000. The final products will be premiered during Inspire Media’s largest event during the school year, the annual Symposium on Social Issue Media in May.






The Important Stuff:

• Several grants of up to $500 are given each year
• The project can be any form of media: photo or video journalism, sculpture, music album, radio piece, short film, painting exhibition, live theatre, etc.
• Will be premiered at spring Symposium

Come see this year’s OMGs at the Spring Symposium

After, a claymation by Abraham Benson-Goldberg: When a tiny, messy, space faring race lands on a seemingly uninhabited planet, they swiftly colonize it like every other planet they’ve been on–only to ruin it for the creatures who already lived there. After the polluters abandon the planet (too polluted to live), they jettison the planet and it’s inhabitants to deal with the consequences.


Skypilots, by Eric Bodge and Collin Davis: An experimental two-man roaming film crew that approaches people at random on the streets of Chicago. Cameras rolling, the conceptual goal is to capture genuine reaction from real, unsuspecting people using nonverbal communication. Each chapter showcases a different method of interaction and how it functioned on the street, from written word and drawing to digital photography and audio recording. The footage is then compiled and cut within 24 hours of the shoot in the way we feel best represents the results.


“What’s on Chicago’s Plate?” by Sisi Wei, Emily Chow, Julie Ma, Vanessa Shen: A photo and audio essay project that strives to demonstrate the stark socio-economic disparities that exist in Chicago’s neighborhoods, through a universal language we all understand: food. The project will display in a photograph Chicago families and the food the eat in one week, and in an audio segment, the considerations each family goes while making their grocery decisions. The Chicago Plate project will culminate in a web-based presentation that will guide audiences through each family’s situation and give viewers a very real and relatable way to understand the diverse economic situations of the families in Chicago.


The Children of Cerro Rico, A documentary/photography project by Rebecca Montag: The miners of Cerro Rico in Potosi, Bolivia live lives of hardship, working and living in difficult conditions as they spend their days in the dark mining the barren hill. Disease and early death come with this dangerous lifestyle and there are few riches to be had. Their children often grow up on the hill without health care, clean water or electricity, a good education, or the opportunity for a better life. The cycle thus continues and these children become the miners of the future, some starting at a dangerously young age. This project will investigate the lives of these children through both photography and a documentary, through volunteering at a center for mining children on Cerro Rico and conducting photography classes for a small group of them. After they are taught photography basics, they will be given 35mm cameras to take photos of people, places, and things that tell a story, showing what life is like for these children through their own eyes. Together, the photos and the documentary made about the process will portray the hope and joy along with the difficulties that these children find in everyday life on Cerro Rico.


“The Dream,” a sequence of audio and video footage by Meixi Ng: Vignettes of young individuals growing up in marginalized communities in Guatemala, Perú, Singapore, Thailand, Ghana and France. This project seeks to showcase individual profiles that symbolize the hope and power of the younger generation around the world in communities in crisis. I was personally so encouraged by the students’ hope and passion and want to share that with you. The piece is an encouragement to all young change makers out there – to learn and be inspired by this young people across the globe and to join in this movement with them. In essence, this piece really shows how interconnected and similar we are as young people and how our courage will carry the next generation forward. If we work together and support each other, we can change the world. This is a statement of that.


The Worker Mannequin, a participatory art piece by Kira Hooks: Our campus supports the slogan, “ONE Northwestern,” hoping to tear down those divisions of school, location, grade, and social groups that may separate us. Many, however, forget to mention our dedicated staff as part of one of these divisions. Like our committed faculty, NU’s loyal staff are people who appreciate the same type of relationship building interactions that we give to our professors in class. The mannequin I will create will speak to these relationships trying to be fostered. The mannequins represent the workers of our campus, hardworking, dedicated, yet often forgotten or taken for granted. On the worker’s uniforms would be actual “life stories,” that cover who they are, a little about their family, their background, why they work at NU, and how they feel about working at NU. The symbolism being that you could walk right by (like many of us do), or actually go up and interact with the mannequins, transforming this “thing” into something you can now empathize and connect with. This project is designed to closer examine how we look at the ways we form relationships and interact with the “invisible backbone” of Northwestern, and what this says about us as a community.


A Future Without Football a performance piece by Kevin McFarland: Just how important to Americans is football, financially, culturally, and in terms of their identity? On October 19, 2009, Malcolm Gladwell published a report in The New Yorker on the rising issue of the lasting impact of head injuries on NFL players, and the possible ramifications of head injuries on every level in the sport of American Football. The NFL is now the most profitable American professional sports league, replacing baseball as “America’s pastime,” but mounting evidence of the dangers of the sport threaten to send it packing the way of boxing thirty years ago. At this moment, the demise of football is unthinkable, but with the dangers becoming more apparent with more available brain research data, how many parents will allow children to play Pop Warner, high school, or college football in hopes of reaching the NFL in such a potentially dangerous sport? This project will explore these issues through a multi-level dramatic performance inspired by interviews with players, coaches and fans.