Featured Member Project

Featured Member

Parisian dance troupe, Indans' Cité, performs at Cloud Place. Photo credit: Joel Veak.

The Cloud Foundation, located in Boston, is a multifunctional educational foundation that focuses on the cultural development of youth in urban Boston by providing support for performance, filmmaking, and fine arts programs. One of the tenants of the Cloud Foundation’s mission is to promote communication among young people across cultural barriers through the arts. With that in mind, the foundation created an international exchange program for young artists with the Cloud Foundation’s sister organization, Nuage-France, in Paris.

Each year, the Cloud Foundation sends a group of talented young artists from one of its partner arts organizations to Paris, and likewise, Nuage-France sends young Parisian artists to Boston. The visiting students participate in citywide cultural programming, meet and collaborate with local peers, engage in artmaking or perform with local artists, and visit cultural facilities in the city. This fall, the Cloud Foundation is hosting a youth dance troupe, Indans’Cité, from France, after sending a Boston dance troupe, Urban Essence, to Paris over the summer. Past groups have included theater troupes, visual artists, filmmakers, and performance artists.

All travel and living expenses for the young artists and their chaperones are covered for the duration of their visit. Grantees are selected based on the strength of their organization’s programming and commitment to their craft. Since its inception in 1999, The Cloud Foundation has evolved from a purely grantmaking foundation to an operating foundation with a youth arts center, Cloud Place, and an international exchange program, in addition to continuing its partnerships with area youth arts organizations, in an effort to provide quality arts experiences to the young people of Boston.