Films include Boy Howdy! The Story of Creem Magazine, Strange Negotiations: The David Bazan Documentary, and festival favorite Knock Down the House

Another amazing lineup of Kickstarter creators will bring their documentaries, narrative features, and shorts to Austin, TX, for the SXSW Film Festival (March 8–16, 2019)).

“The SXSW Film Festival is known for welcoming fiercely independent, smart, fun, and often irreverent filmmaking. It's no surprise that Kickstarter creators often make up a significant portion of the festival's lineup,” says Kickstarter Film’s Liz Cook Mowe.

Kickstarter’s Film team will also be at SXSW this March cheering on Kickstarter-funded filmmakers at their films’ world premieres (Follow @Kickstarter on Instagram for live updates), enjoying too many breakfast tacos, and meeting with filmmakers interested in running campaigns. Will you be at SXSW too? Get in touch with our Film team at film@kickstarter.com

Thought Leaders are an international group of Kickstarter creators who are celebrated as leaders in their fields.

In 2017, Kickstarter introduced our first Thought Leaders, an international group of Kickstarter creators and advocates selected for their wisdom, experience, and contributions to the creative community.

Since then, Thought Leaders have teamed up with their communities to lead events and launch groundbreaking projects. Here are just a few of the things they accomplished:

• Oscar Lhermitte teamed up with us to launch Quickstarter, an evergreen initiative inviting creators to launch small projects on Kickstarter 
• C. Spike Trotman led a discussion at New York ComicCon called “Advanced Kickstarter Skills” 
• Craighton Berman hosted a Kickstarter Project Jam with creators in Minneapolis, MN, and created a zine to help creators through the process of launching a small-batch product on Kickstarter
• Hope Nicholson led a conversation at San Diego ComicCon called "Kickstart Your Comic Like a Pro"

We're proud to welcome 13 new creators to the Thought Leaders program in 2019:

Throughout the month of February, Kickstarter will celebrate Exquisite Objects, a collection of artful publishing and design projects created to delight the senses. Here, Kickstarter’s Director of Publishing Margot Atwell shares a bit more about the initiative.

Spending an afternoon in a rare or secondhand bookshop is one of my favorite things to do. Trailing my finger along the spines of gorgeous leather-bound gold-embossed hardcover books; sliding a book out of its protective slipcase and thumbing the deckled edges. Beautifully published books create new entry points into classic works and encourage new ways of experiencing old stories. They can also signify that a text is worthy of a reader’s time and attention.

This month, we’ve invited a few of our favorite creators to dream big and make something truly stunning and out of the ordinary. We call these works “Exquisite Objects” because the care put into their creation far surpasses the common paperback—these works incorporate an attention to detail worthy of a museum display. To borrow a phrase from Josh O'Neill of Beehive Books, these books are "refined, gorgeous, and elegant, but still somehow kind of punk rock."

The Kickstarter Comics category had a massive year in 2018, with backers from around the world pledging a record $16 million to projects large and small. For nearly a decade, comics makers have been coming to Kickstarter in pursuit of creative autonomy. This sense of independence has fostered the robust community of comics lovers we see on Kickstarter today. And it keeps growing!

Here’s the breakdown from last year:

• $16 million pledged to all projects, up 26% from 2017.
  
• $15.3 million pledged to successfully funded projects, up 27% from 2017.
  
• 1,457 projects funded, up 14% from 2017, the previous best year, and nearly triple the amount in 2012.
  
• 70% funding success rate

We’re excited to announce the open call for Kickstarter’s Spring/Summer 2019 Creators-in-Residence program

Launched in 2017, our Creators-in-Residence program invites NYC-based creators who are in the process of planning, launching, or about to fulfill a Kickstarter campaign to join us at our Brooklyn HQ for a three-month residency. Past residents have included choreographer Raja Feather Kelly, artist and author Adam J. Kurtz, and artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

The Spring/Summer 2019 session will run from Monday, March 4, through Friday, May 31. During the residency, each creator will be paired with a staff mentor who specializes in their area of interest and will offer guidance on how to manage a Kickstarter campaign. Residents receive access to a dedicated workspace, as well as our theater, recording studio, library, meeting rooms, and kitchen. They also have opportunities to be featured in Kickstarter-produced editorial content, and are invited to attend regular workshops, talks, performances, and feedback sessions that put them in conversation with other creators and Kickstarter staff.

Interested in applying? Applications are due by Friday, February 8. Creators will be notified by February 22 if they’ve been selected for the program. Apply here.

Announcing Just the Beginning, a new podcast from Kickstarter featuring stories about how independent creators bring their ideas to life. The first episode comes out on January 24, and you can listen to a preview now:

Just when you thought the Games category on Kickstarter couldn’t get any bigger, it did. 2018 was the category’s best year yet, featuring over 3,300 funded projects from both household names like Homestar Runner and new voices like Miguel Angel Espinoza. 

We at Kickstarter are very proud to be part of such a powerful, positive, and proactive community. Here, we look back at 2018 in numbers and projects. 

Today we’re excited to announce that Oriana Leckert has joined Kickstarter as our Journalism Outreach Lead. Oriana has spent more than a decade working in the media: She’s written for a variety of outlets, including Slate, New York Post, Gothamist, Atlas Obscura, and Curbed, and she has edited for many more, including MTV News, Hyperallergic, Pitchfork, Voice of Witness, and The Believer. Her first book, Brooklyn Spaces: 50 Hubs of Culture and Creativity (Monacelli Press, 2015), grew out of a multi-year project chronicling the rise and fall of under-the-radar creative places across New York City.