Here's a number that should make every working artist uncomfortable: the average artist applying to residencies, grants, and fellowships spends 5–15 hours per week on administrative tasks. That's searching for opportunities, tracking deadlines, reformatting materials, copying and pasting the same bio into yet another submission portal. It's the unsexy scaffolding of a creative career — and it's eating your studio time alive.
Yohanna Baez knows this firsthand. A Dominican-born, Los Angeles-raised, New York-based artist and filmmaker — a 2022 Tribeca Festival Creators Market participant and winner of the 2015 Urbanworld Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay — she's lived the grind of juggling creative work with the relentless admin that sustains it. And she decided to do something about it.
ArtistTracker is the tool she built. It's an AI-powered assistant that finds grants, residencies, and fellowships matched to your specific practice, tracks your deadlines, and sends you reminders — so you never miss an opportunity because you were too busy making work to check a spreadsheet.
The real problem isn't motivation
There's a persistent myth in the art world that artists who miss deadlines or let opportunities slip are lazy or disorganized. The truth is simpler and more frustrating: the systems are broken. Every application portal has a different interface. Every program wants your statement formatted slightly differently. Every deadline lives in a different corner of the internet. Keeping track of it all is a part-time job — on top of the actual part-time (or full-time) job most artists already have to pay rent.
"For the blog post, I'd love to focus on how artists can save as much time as possible on administrative work so they can reinvest that time into making art," Yohanna told us. "That's really the heart of what I'm trying to build."
It's a deceptively simple idea: what if you could reclaim those 5–15 hours a week and put them back where they belong — in the studio, at the easel, in front of the camera, at the keyboard?
What ArtistTracker actually does
ArtistTracker uses AI to scan the landscape of opportunities and surface the ones that match your discipline, career stage, and goals. Instead of spending your Sunday afternoon scrolling through five different databases and cross-referencing deadlines in a Google Sheet, the tool does the searching for you — and organizes what it finds into a clear, trackable pipeline.
The key features:
- AI-powered opportunity matching. Tell ArtistTracker about your practice and it finds grants, residencies, and fellowships that are actually relevant to you — not a firehose of everything, but a curated feed based on your work.
- Deadline tracking and reminders. Never miss another deadline because it was buried in a bookmark folder. ArtistTracker keeps your calendar current and nudges you before things close.
- Smart organization. Track what you've applied to, what's coming up, and what's worth your time — all in one place instead of scattered across spreadsheets, email, and sticky notes.
Built by an artist, for artists
What sets ArtistTracker apart from generic productivity tools is that it was designed by someone who understands the specific texture of an artist's administrative life. Yohanna isn't a tech founder who discovered the "art market" — she's an artist who got tired of the broken systems and decided to build better infrastructure.
That matters. It means the tool is designed around how artists actually work, not how a product manager imagines they work. It means the AI isn't trying to replace your creative judgment — it's handling the tedious parts so your judgment stays sharp for the work that matters.
Yohanna is building ArtistTracker slowly and deliberately, inviting a small group of artists to test the platform and shape what it becomes before opening wider. It's the kind of careful, artist-first approach that resonates with how we think about building tools at RMAR — correct over fast, right constituency over mass market.
The math of time
Let's do some back-of-the-envelope math. Say you're spending 8 hours a week on opportunity research, deadline management, and application logistics. That's 416 hours a year — roughly ten full work weeks. Ten weeks you could have spent in the studio. Ten weeks of paintings, films, manuscripts, sculptures, or performances that didn't happen because you were formatting a PDF.
Even cutting that admin time in half gives you back 200 hours a year. That's a residency's worth of studio time — without leaving home.
This is the real value proposition of tools like ArtistTracker: not that they make you "more productive" in some corporate sense, but that they give you back the thing every artist is actually short on. Not motivation. Not talent. Time.
Two tools, one mission
We see ArtistTracker and RMAR as complementary parts of the same ecosystem. RMAR helps you discover residencies, read reviews from artists who've been there, and apply through a portal that keeps your data portable and artist-owned. ArtistTracker helps you find the full spectrum of opportunities — grants, fellowships, residencies, and more — and stay on top of every deadline without burning out.
Together, they represent a shift in how artists manage their careers: away from scattered spreadsheets and frantic last-minute scrambles, toward systems that respect your time and protect your creative energy.
Try it
ArtistTracker is currently in early access. You can learn more and sign up at artisttracker.co.
And if you're already using RMAR to track residencies and open calls, consider how much more time you could reclaim by letting AI handle the opportunity search while you handle the art.
The best tools for artists are the ones that disappear into the background — that handle the logistics so quietly you forget they're there, and all you notice is that you have more time to work. That's what Yohanna is building, and we're here for it.