The 2027 Folly Tree Arboretum Dancing Tree Award
Know before you apply
- Anyone with a completed environmental project
- Collaborative teams and collectives
- Makers from any field or background
- Completed projects only, no proposals
- One $3000 award split among teams
- Open to any field or discipline
The Folly Tree Arboretum is excited to open the open call for the Dancing Tree Award for Unorthodox Environmental Projects. This annual award offers $3000 to a completed project that uses an unexpected method to communicate environmental awareness. At Folly Tree, we believe that compelling storytelling is vital for lasting environmental change. Conveying the scale, urgency, and real-life impact of ecological crises is one of today's most pressing cultural challenges. The Dancing Tree Award aims to support new voices and unconventional approaches—projects that lean toward optimism and challenge the prevailing currents of nihilism and stagnation. We seek work that explores the complexity of our connection with the natural world in ways that are hopeful, inspiring, humorous, daring, exciting, quirky, provocative, weird, experimental, playful, irreverent, or surprisingly effective. We celebrate projects that embody a lively, optimistic path forward, even in the face of seemingly impossible environmental challenges.
The Dancing Tree Award honors work that rejects despair, embraces imagination, and paves new ways forward amid seemingly insurmountable ecological challenges.