Mary Jane Edwards
Mary Jane Edwards is director of The Arts Foundation, a charity that supports individual artists and creatives in the U.K. with unconditional financial fellowships through the Arts Foundation Futures Awards. Since 1993, the Arts Foundation has awarded over £2 million to the most promising artists in the UK at a pivotal moment in their careers to enable them to concentrate on their creative development, experiment, and realize their artistic potential. The annual Arts Foundation Futures Awards provide transformative £20,000 Fellowships, with all Shortlisted Artists receiving £1,000 towards the development of their practice. The vital contribution of the Arts Foundation Futures Awards to the arts in the UK is demonstrated by its past Fellows, many of whom are regarded as contemporary pioneers and have gone on to become leaders in their respective art forms, including: Sir Wayne McGregor CBE (1994), Alice Oswald (1996), Joy Gregory (1996), Sarah Kane (1998), Hannah Starkey (2000), Asif Kapadia (2001), Ali Smith (2001), Rufus Norris (2002), Carol Morley (2003), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2006), and more recently, Simon Fujiwara (2009), Sam Lee (2011), Alice Birch (2014), Hollie McNish (2015), Evan Ifekoya (2017), Holly Hendry (2019), Onyeka Igwe (2020), Klein (2020), Bethany Williams (2020) and Tanoa Sasraku (2021).
