This grant provides three years of support for two separate programs: (1) to maintain the Sloan Science & Film website, scienceandfilm.org, the most comprehensive site for the Sloan Film Program, and develop related events, outreach, and educational materials and (2) to administer the annual Sloan Grand Jury Prize and Sloan Student Discovery Prize, which celebrate two outstanding feature film screenplays each year that integrate scientific or technological themes or characters.   New initiatives include an annual virtual film summit for all Foundation-supported filmmakers, annual screenings of Sloan student shorts, a catalog of supported films in active development for agents and producers, and a scholarly catalog or teacher’s guide. This grant will also partially fund an exhibition about medical imaging technologies and contemporary art inspired by a Sloan book, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the 20th Century by Bettyann Kevles.    The Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize was created to pick a “best of the best” from winning screenplays at the Foundation’s six year-round film school partners to support its next level of development. In addition to a $20,000 cash prize, the winners receive industry exposure, feedback, and year-round science and film industry mentorship. The Discovery Prize selects screenplays from six new film schools not partnered with Sloan year-round.

This grant is for the research, production, and broadcast of two new documentary shows for the American Experience series: Make Way for the Highway and Feather Wars.   Make Way for the Highway is about the development of the interstate highway system, which revolutionized not only the way Americans drive, but the way they live. And while there were many obvious benefits—greater mobility and faster shipping – there were many neighborhoods that were destroyed in the process, disproportionately impacting poor and minority neighborhoods.  This two-hour documentary will tell the story of the largest construction project in American history and its lasting impact on rural, suburban and urban Americans across racial and socioeconomic lines.   Feather Wars tells the little-known tale of the turn-of-the-century craze for feathers worn in women’s fashion and how the egregious slaughter of birds to feed this frenzy led to backlash and the emergence of the conservation movement. Because the Gilded Age economy created a new class of consumers and the Industrial Revolution allowed for faster and cheaper consumption, the booming demand for feathers in women’s fashion resulted in the wholesale slaughter of birds. This one-hour documentary will trace how Theodore Roosevelt and women activists launched a conservation movement that led to the end of the brutal feather trade and the creation of the Audubon society.

L.A. Theatre Works (LATW), the nation's leading producer of audio theater, will build on its highly successful collaboration with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through the Relativity series. This grant will support the recording, in studio and live in-performance, of three of the best new Foundation-supported plays over the next two years. Leading candidates include Smart, by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, about bringing an Alexa-type AI assistant into your home; Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? by Michael Walek, about the famed primatologist and her first trip to Africa; and Las Borinqueñas, by Nelson Diaz-Marcano, about the development of the birth control pill as viewed through early clinical trials on women in Puerto Rico.   Each play recording is paired with supplemental material, including interviews with scientists, technologists and other experts.   In addition to these three new plays, LATW will nationally broadcast 12 other science plays from their Relativity series that were previously recorded. LATW will also take the same three plays plus eight additional science plays from the library to be remastered and released as podcasts.   An educational guide with play recordings will be distributed to 3,600 teachers, reaching an estimated 130,000 middle and high school students. There will also be comprehensive marketing and distribution and continued development of the LATW web site and Relativity educational portal.

This grant provides three more years of support for Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST)’s pioneering Sloan science and theater program, which develops, produces, and disseminates plays with scientific characters and themes.With this grant, EST will commission 30-40 new plays over three years, each with a $10,000 stipend. Alongside these commissions, EST will produce three Mainstage Productions, an annual festival with readings and workshops, and provide seed grants to regional theaters to produce Sloan plays.   To date, the EST/Sloan partnership has fostered close to 400 new science plays with 61 currently in development including 28 fully staged productions at EST and over a hundred more EST/Sloan productions nationwide reaching 75 different theaters.