Institute for Advanced Study - Artist in Residence Fellowships 2025/26

Theme of the Fellowship: Dis/place

Cosmopolitanism is rarely as rootless as the cliché would have it, yet artists often happily uproot themselves both to take their works to distant audiences (the exhibition, the book launch) as well as to put bread on the table (the fellowship). Conventionally, works of art and literature have been celebrated for capturing a locale in distinctive fashion and transporting distant viewers and readers into that space. Subsequent critiques of site- specific art have sometimes celebrated more liminal qualities, but the allure of authorial nomadism should not be exaggerated. This year the IAS invites applications from artists and writers wrestling with places not their own, locales they dislike, elsewheres that alienate, or perhaps mobilities that ultimately offer only illusory glimpses of freedom. Come write, create, and reflect on being in the “wrong” place. Nostalgia, avant-garde impulses, or pathos should not exhaust your options; you may reflexively reexamine and redeploy for your own ends the social conventions, religious dictates, or familiar sensations that lent propriety to the places you call your own, and explore what it means not to find yourself there.

Details of the Fellowship

IAS CEU offers annually one Writer in Residence fellowship and one Visual/New Media Artist in Residence fellowship to provide selected artists with opportunities to conceptualize and create new works while providing the fellow community with opportunities for meaningful interaction with artists working in various fields. These two residential fellowships (up to 5 months each with a minimum stay of 3 months) are offered on a competitive basis to internationally established as well as emerging artists, in creative writing (from poetry and prose to drama, screen and playwriting) and in the visual arts, including new media art (from painting to filming and from digital art to computer graphics to interactive art).

We seek artists who will be able to work independently, have a solid plan of work for their fellowship period and are ready to engage with the intellectual life at the Institute and the university. Artists in residence are expected to participate in the academic life of the community of IAS Fellows, which includes participation in the weekly Fellows’ seminar and a presentation of their own artistic or literary work.

To be in residence at IAS CEU means to work and participate in an academic community, to receive technical and artistic assistance and to be immersed in a vibrant city's cultural life. While in residence, artists benefit from an intense production time enhanced by the exchange of ideas and experiences with fellows of the Institute. The Institute views art and scholarship as complementary rather than separate activities, which interact dynamically and encourage mutual productivity.

IAS CEU is an independent Institute for Advanced Study. It is based at the Budapest Campus of Central European University. As of the Academic Year 2019/20 CEU is operating at two locations, the main university at the Vienna Campus and some institutes and centers at the Budapest Campus. Hosting its programs at the latter campus and in one of Central Europe's attractive cities, IAS CEU seeks to benefit from this new arrangement and to be part of the rich academic life and research generated in both places - from its premises in Budapest, as independent and yet integral part of the university and its location right in the center of city. While CEU was forced to move its accredited degree programs from Hungary to its new campus in Vienna, the Budapest Campus hosts, apart from the IAS, the bi-campus library, the Open Society Archive (OSA), the Summer School Network (SUN), a number of research centres and projects and, since September 2020, CEU’s new Democracy Institute.

Application

The Call for AY 2025/26 is now open. The deadline for applications has been extended to 30 September 2024.