The Folly Tree Arboretum is excited to announce the open call for the Dancing Tree Award for Unorthodox Environmental Projects. This annual award offers $2,500 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 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.

Submission Deadline: February 2, 2026

Who can apply:  Anyone! Everyone! You can even apply for someone else! Collaborative teams may apply. Please share with those whom you think may be interested in applying.

One award will be given to one project, so award funds must be split by teams & collaborators. 

We encourage humans from any field and background to apply with finished works they feel may relate to this theme, even if loosely or abstractly.

Existing completed projects from any of these fields and beyond may apply:

films / videos, sculptures / installation, paintings / drawings / prints, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, design, architecture, creative marketing / advertisement, fashion, craft, new media, social practice, memes, web art, software, games, sports, bio-art, food, music, dance, theater, performance, engineering, activism, landscape design, farming, care-giving, teaching, gardening, etc.

1.) Contact info, including name of awardee(s), email(s), and phone number(s)

2.) Title of Project

3.) One sentence description of project.

4.) 250 word abstract describing your existing project as clearly and concretely as possible.

5.) link to the work or uploaded documentation that you feel best represents the work. 

APPLY HERE!

Please direct any questions to info@follytreearboretum.com. Please note that we may not be able to answer questions until after the January 26 deadline.