“It’s really dramatic — in the artist field, it’s a crisis,” the CEO of the newly consolidated Tribeca Film Institute, Brian Newman, said recently. “Of course, there are bigger crises in the world and horrible things going on, but for artists it’s become really difficult to raise money for interesting projects.”

Last month, the existing Tribeca Film Institute, the brainchild of Tribeca Film Festival founders Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, and Craig Hatkoff, accrued major new financial clout when it fused with Renew Media, a nonprofit organization, dedicated to supporting independent filmmakers, that Mr. Newman has shepherded for the past five years. By combining with Renew Media (which began as National Video Resources), the Tribeca Film Institute not only acquired deeper pockets for funding film, video, and new-media artists, but drafted a leader in Mr. Newman who possesses a unique perspective on both the nonprofit and for-profit media playing fields.

“The purpose of NVR,” Mr. Newman said, “was to help filmmakers distribute their independent films to a broader audience.” That organization’s responsibilities also included the disbursement of monies for the Rockefeller Media Fellowships, a funding initiative for filmmakers. Five years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation deeded full control of the fellowship program to NVR and made the organization increasingly responsible for finding its own money.

“Around that same time we changed our name to Renew Media, mainly because we didn’t like the name NVR,” Mr. Newman said. Though the organization continued to be partially funded by the original benefactors, Renew Media became “a stand-alone nonprofit entity” and “not an arm of the Rockefeller Foundation,” Mr. Newman said.

Renew Media’s rebirth coincided with the explosion of new technologies that have altered the film and visual-arts landscape. “Digital has changed everything,” Mr. Newman said. “There are new ways of making films and new ways of delivering them to people.” But in the gray area between art and commerce that filmmaking occupies in America, opportunity still comes at a price. “Everyone hears that cameras are getting cheaper and anyone can put their stuff up on YouTube,” Mr. Newman said. “But making quality work is still relatively expensive. In Europe and many foreign countries, you have government subsidies.”

Here at home, the Sundance Institute’s development initiatives help, as do grant and fellowship programs at such nonprofits as the Jerome Foundation and Creative Capital, which champion non-marketplace-supported artistic visions.

“But they can only fund so many people,” Mr. Newman, who, in 2007, set about exploring new ways to broaden Renew Media’s support horizons, said. “About a year ago, I started talking with Jane Rosenthal about potential collaborations. Within an hour of talking, we decided that we should be thinking about a potential merger. We looked at our funding sources to make sure we weren’t both getting money from the exact same people.”

The talks culminated in the announcement, six weeks ago, of the combination of the Tribeca Institute and Renew Media, “and there was hardly any overlap.” The merger has, in fact, resulted in an allocation growth spurt. Under the single Tribeca Film Institute banner, “we’ve been able to increase the amount of money we give out to artists to about $1.25 million a year,” Mr. Newman said. “And we’ll hopefully keep increasing that every year.”

While the Tribeca Film Institute’s restructuring is ongoing (“We haven’t had time to even merge the two Web sites”), its mission remains clear. The organization’s existence is predicated upon “being an advocate on behalf of filmmaker and other media artists’ needs,” Mr. Newman said. The Tribeca Film Institute’s purview covers funding, services, development labs similar to the peer-support programs associated with Sundance and Cannes, and community outreach and youth education programs.

The challenges and opportunities ahead, according to Mr. Newman, are tied to the institute’s dynamic synthesis of altruism and entrepreneurship. “We want to explore what are the potential overlaps of the for-profit arm of Tribeca and the nonprofit arm, and work together in a way that will be better for the field,” he said. “On the nonprofit side, you’re constantly trying to fund-raise for the new programs you’re launching. That’s not how venture capital does it. They raise a fund and they go do their initiatives.” At the same time, as a nonprofit entity, “there are no shareholders,” Mr. Newman said. “Any profit we make in anything we do we can put back into our programs.”

Current Tribeca Film Institute programs include outreach initiatives within the Tribeca Film Festival, which launches its seventh edition tonight, as well as in the Summer Arts Institute, which is staged in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. Grant initiatives, such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s financial support of narrative works dealing with science and technology and the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, supplement the organization’s coveted Media Arts Fellowships.

But in every creative arena explored by the Tribeca Film Institute, the controlling agenda is the same. “You can look at some production and development funds, and they’re defiantly about only funding things that are addressing social issues,” Mr. Newman said. “It’s very hard to find money just for people who are just making really interesting films.”

Under the Rockefeller Foundation, NVR, Renew Media, and now the Trbeca Film Institute, “the Media Arts Fellowships have always been about the filmmakers,” Mr. Newman said. “The panel that we bring together — peers in the field, other filmmakers, other media artists, other critics and curators of film — they say, ‘These are films that we feel have something different about them. They’re more innovative, they’re taking an interesting angle on the subject matter.'”

Last year’s Media Arts Fellows — including “Old Joy” director Kelly Reichardt, Jonathan Caouette, maker of the praised first-person video memoir “Tarnation,” and the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs — are an innovative lot indeed. “I think they find some interesting people,” Mr. Newman said of his selection brain trust, without a trace of understatement.