2026 3Arts Awards Celebration

About 3Arts
Founded in 1912 with a history centered on women artists and reimagined as an arts service organization in 2007, 3Arts supports artists in the Chicago metropolitan and Carbondale areas working in the performing, teaching, and visual arts, including women-identified artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists. By providing unrestricted awards, project funding, residencies, professional development, and promotion, 3Arts helps artists take risks, experiment, and build momentum in their careers over time.  

About the Awards:

3Arts Award
Our signature program, ten artists working in dance, music, teaching arts, theater, and visual arts are selected by 40 anonymous nominators and six national jury panels to receive $30,000 unrestricted awards. In 2025, we expanded this program to provide additional awards to artists in Southern Illinois (Carbondale area).

Next Level Award
A unique program in which past award recipients may apply to receive a second unrestricted award at a higher level ($50,000) to support them at critical junctures as their creative practices and careers evolve.

Make a Wave
An artist-to-artist grant program that erases the traditional gatekeeper by inviting each of the previous year’s 3Arts Awards recipients to select another artist to receive a surprise $2,000 unrestricted award from 3Arts.

For more information about 3Arts, please visit www.3arts.org. 

About the Performers:

Keyierra Collins (2020 3Arts Awardee) is a dancer, teaching artist, and choreographer based in Chicago, IL. Collins earned a BA in Dance from Columbia College Chicago where she studied varies dance forms including West African, modern, jazz, ballet, some hip hop forms, and improvisation. As a dance artist, Collins has collaborated with a number of choreographers including Onye Ozuzu, Paige Cunningham, Margi Cole, Emily Stein, Anna Martine Whitehead, Dorothee Munyaneza, and Sonita Surratt to name a few.  As a choreographer, Collins's work explores how dance and movement can be used to heal trauma, particularly the collective and individual trauma experienced by people of the African diaspora. Having traveled and worked with artists in Haiti and Nigeria, Collins wants to continue to travel and collaborating with artists around the world.   

Sandra Delgado (2018 3Arts Awardee) is an award-winning Colombian-Chicagoan writer, performer, and producer who creates Latiné-centered spaces for joy and connection. Hailed as "her own brand of triple threat" (New City Chicago), she specializes in plays inspired by underknown Chicago histories.

Her smash-hit play La Havana Madrid enjoyed sold-out runs at Steppenwolf and Goodman Theatre before making its West Coast debut at South Coast Repertory. A 20-year stage veteran, her acting credits include Off-Broadway’s The Public Theater and Chicago’s top regional houses. Sandra is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 3Arts Award recipient, and one of twenty women honored in Kerry James Marshall’s mural at the Chicago Cultural Center. 

Sparklmami (2025 3Arts Awardee) is a Texas-born, Chicago-based musician and visual artist. Her songwriting draws from her confessional subconscious, exploring themes of perception and identity over her band’s improvisational mix of experimental soul, Mexican bolero, and jazz funk.

Her much anticipated debut record In This Body – featuring the acclaimed singles “Fajas” and “running” – invites listeners into a lush world of reverie, nostalgia, and possibility. It’s a sound that pulls from myriad places: the glimmering, verdant jazz made in 1970s Brazil, the open-hearted Mexican boleros she grew up listening to at home, the whimsy of Indian singer Runa Laila, and of course the improvisations and ideas of her bandmates.