The grant matching platform for artists
Outside the Studio was a newspaper before it was a platform.
Outside the Studio was first a ballet school newspaper. Dance news, interviews, tips, and the students themselves. Nearly a decade later the name is repurposed for a funding platform for freelance and independent artists of every kind.
Counted live from the index, not written into the page.
The name
The founder is primarily a dance artist. Living and working as a freelancer in Berlin is what connected the dots. No matter how talented or how hard working, every artist in her network was struggling to fund their work through grants and residencies. That is where the idea came from.
The name is an homage to the founder's beginnings, a school newspaper at Canada's National Ballet School. What it does now is connect artists with the funding they are most likely to get. The mission is to change hundreds of artists' lives by giving independent artists a voice and a leg up: room to show their projects and still keep a livelihood.
The problem
Funding for artists is not hidden. It is scattered. It sits on a few hundred arts council pages, foundation sites, and residency listings that each publish differently, update on their own schedule, and expire without warning.
So finding a grant becomes a research job. You open twenty tabs, you check the same councils every few weeks in case something changed, and you still find out about the one you wanted three days after it closed. The work is unpaid, it repeats every season, and it comes out of the hours you meant to spend making work.
The listings that do exist are usually national, usually one discipline, and rarely tell you whether you are eligible before you have read the whole page.
Finding a grant today
- Twenty tabs open, every council publishing on its own schedule.
- The one you wanted, found three days after it closed.
- No way to tell whether you qualify until you have read the whole page.
- The same search again next season, from the beginning.
Finding a grant here
- Every source we track, read daily, on one page.
- Deadlines on a calendar, with the closest ones in red.
- Eligibility checked against where you are based before you read a word.
- Set your profile once. The index keeps reading it.
What this does instead
One index, updated daily, read across every source we track. You set up your profile once, with your discipline, your career stage, and where you are based. After that you see what fits and not what does not.
That is the whole idea. Less time searching, more time applying, and fewer deadlines found too late.
Who it is for
Every discipline in the index, and how much of it there is right now.
Why independent artists
Independent artists matter. They are the makers of change, innovation, taste and culture. Change always starts at grassroots. It starts with peeling away from the norm, and funding artistic talent is the first step toward a richer cultural life all over the world.
Meet the founder
Masha Scherbina
National Ballet School. San Francisco Ballet School and Company. Kinesiology, UBC. MPH, University of Victoria. Three years making work in Berlin.
Hi, I'm Masha. I'm so excited to have you here.
I'm a classically trained ballet dancer from Canada's National Ballet School, and I spent some time dancing with the San Francisco Ballet School and Company. After a persistent injury took me away from professional ballet, I did my Kinesiology degree at the University of British Columbia. During that time I also started a kids movement and mindfulness program called Mind Moves, and ran it successfully for two years in over 10 community centres and schools in Vancouver.
After my undergraduate degree I was seeking to reconnect with my artistic roots, and my gut took me to Berlin. Before that I was lucky enough to train in contact improvisation with Peter Bingham, on scholarship at EDAM Dance in Vancouver. With a new somatic sense under my belt I ventured to Berlin and met an array of artists, musicians, painters and dancers, all weaving their talents together into underground performances, gallery nights, site-specific works and open studios. The art I saw in Berlin spoke to me in ways that continue to move me and expand me, and I started choreographing my own solos and dance films.
I continued my contemporary training at B12 Workshops in Berlin and applied for many, many grants, both for myself and as part of a collective. I know firsthand the painstaking work it takes to find the right grants for you, to miss deadlines, to collect dozens of rejections and to feel forlorn about your chances. Finally I received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to do a choreographic mentorship in Toronto with Peggy Baker, who I already knew from my time at NBS, in the summer of 2024. After those two weeks I felt renewed and inspired to keep choreographing and creating dance works.
That dream had to take a back seat when I started my Master of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria shortly afterwards. For two years I juggled my artistic and academic realities and had no time to find and apply to grants. It led me to start tinkering with this idea: a platform for artists to find grants matched to their exact discipline, location and career stage, and eventually to connect and collaborate together.
A fire lit inside me, and I decided to pay homage to the start of my entrepreneurial dreams. The Outside the Studio newspaper I created at NBS a decade ago. I visited the school this year and saw that the newspaper has lived on through the generations after me. I hope this platform lives on too, to serve and inspire hundreds of artists.
Thank you again for supporting OTS. Any feedback you have, email hello@otsgrants.com, fill out our feedback form, or reach out to me directly.
Cheers to you, artists.
Masha
Independent artist, it is your turn to thrive.
May this platform save you hundreds of hours of searching and applying, and may it land you the opportunity of a lifetime.
Set it up once and the index reads itself against your discipline, your stage, and where you are based.
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