Professor Kurt Rohde has been given a 2022 San Francisco Arts Commission fund. The $20,000 commission will be used to support 4:30 Movie, a new twenty-minute micro-opera using poems by Donna Masini published in 4:30 Movie (Norton, 2020). These funny, touching, ruthless poems take the reader through the diagnosis, treatment and death of the author’s sister from cancer. Using the language of how movies are made and consumed, Masini tells the story of her sister’s struggle, and of her grief—both during her treatment and after her death.

The San Francisco Arts Commission awards $7.6 million to 113 arts nonprofits and individual artists for grants beginning fiscal year 2022. This investment in San Francisco’s arts ecosystem supports 75 San Francisco-based individual artists and 38 local arts nonprofits, all of whom affirm the Arts Commission’s commitment to racial and cultural equity, and enables artists to be at the forefront of the city’s resilience and recovery effort. —San Francisco Arts Commission

Rohde has received numerous commissions in recent years, including from Chamber Music America (for the Lydian Quartet), the Creative Capital (for the Newtown Odyssey project), and the Bogliasco Foundation (also for the Lydian Quartet). He is also director of the Composers Conference and began The Kurt Rohde Commission Fund in an effort to support composers at different stages of their creative life.