North Bay Bohemian editor Gretchen Giles is among 12 U.S. journalists to win a slot in the first International Arts Journalism Institute in the Visual Arts sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. State Department.

Twelve other journalists and writers from the Middle East, Northern Africa, Asia and other countries will also participate in this immersion program based at Washington, D.C.’s American University June 11-26.

This program provides mid-career art critics and writers the opportunity to participate in a two-week intensive training, visiting art centers and museums along the East Coast as well as attending lectures and panels by art world experts.

This is the third time that a Bohemian staffer or contributor has been honored in this way. In 2006, freelance theater reviewer David Templeton was selected to attend the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater & Musical Theater’s 10-day intensive training at USC at the Annenberg School for Communication. In 2007, then-staff writer Patricia Lynn Henley was invited to participate in the Addiction Studies Program for Journalists, part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Substance Abuse Policy Research Program Conference, as a result of her excellence in covering methamphetamine abuse in the North Bay.