DEADLINE EXTENDED! Applications due OCTOBER 4, 2024, 11:59 PM

Starting 2024, we're streamlining our application process to once a year, in the fall. This year, in addition to the Fellowship for Utopian Practice and the Black Utopian Fellowship, we are excited to announce our new Disability Arts Curatorial Fellowship!

Our Climate Justice Fellowship applications will resume next fall.

 

2024-25 FELLOWSHIP OPEN CALL INFO SESSION RECORDING

 

About the Fellowship for Utopian Practice

Culture Push launched the Fellowship for Utopian Practice in 2012 to support boundary-pushing, interdisciplinary and socially engaged artwork. Our open call used to run twice per year in Spring and Fall, however, beginning with the 2025 open call, we will only be calling for Fellowship applications once per year, in the Fall. Check the guidelines page for information on the next open call submission dates and application instructions. The Fellowship is a process-based program aimed at artists and other creative people who are seeking to test new ideas through civic engagement. Culture Push offers the Fellows concrete financial and institutional support, including feedback and mentoring, a stipend, and fiscal sponsorship for fundraising efforts, and heightened legibility, through support from the Culture Push institution. During the Fellowship year, Fellows collaborate with different communities and the Culture Push staff to find viable working methods for realizing ambitious hybrid projects. While Culture Push emphasizes the visual and performing arts, the Fellowship program is open to people working in any discipline aiming to expand their practice beyond its traditional borders.

2023—2024 Fellows, From Top Left to Bottom Right: Ashley Dawson, Nasrah Omar, Katherine Toukhy, Nifemi Ogunro, Six, Branden Janese, Sabina Sethi Unni, Nora Almeida, Melissa West, Jahtiek Long, Sara Zielinski, Monica Dudárov Hunken, Daddy Delight.

Our current Fellows are working to engage communities directly affected by power plants in New York and reimagine a more sustainable grid; inviting the multifaceted diasporic communities across the city to invoke and reconvene with their ancestral threads and honor their points of convergence; working towards a future of Arab/Afro-Arab liberation via a series of embodiment engagements; reimagining public places as sites of play, rest, and resistance; reigniting the childlike sense of joy in adults through play as a means towards collaborative self-expression and self-discovery; facilitating literary discussions of books centered on Black joy, love, and the future of partnership; engaging community response to disaster preparedness via comedic public theater; conducting site-specific research and oral histories regarding flooding and climate change; igniting an online hub of local arts and cultural coverage in Staten Island; installing hand-made benches across the city in resistance to NYC’s hostile architecture, and using those benches as sites for discussion and education around incarceration and abolition; and bringing drag into the the streets and inviting the public to consider their relationship with clothes, gender, and personal expression.

In our first four years (2012-2016) Fellows created radical free libraries celebrating the history and work of black women; choreographed dances with individuals in solitary confinement; highlighted the stories of longtime residents in a neighborhood rapidly changing; led workshops exploring emergent communities through movement, art, and science; provided local artists with the resources and opportunities to create work in their own communities; engaged with community gardens; dissected the New York Times through a feminist lens; brought history to life through video art; empowered the goddess in queer girls; created a crowd-sourced map of a neighborhood; engaged with food and empowerment; explored the choreography of protest; theorized the theater of philosophical inquiry; re-imagined NYC's waterways; ideated social space in the Bronx; and collaborated with day laborers to create an app that identifies wage theft.

The Fellowship for Utopian Practice is supported, in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and from the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. The Fellowship is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In-kind support provided by
New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and other community partners.

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Logos of the public funds supporting the fellowship for utopian Practice: nyc cultural affairs, shelley & donald rubin foundation, National endowments for the arts and the new york state council on the arts
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PAST FELLOWS

Eli Brown, Trans Family Archive
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Junkanooacome
Sonia Louise Davis, Becoming Together Freedom School

Claudia Prado, Escritura el Transito/Writing in Transit
Damali Abrams, Radical Self-Care Workshops for Busy Black New Yorkers
Mel McIntyre & Adelaide Matthew Dicken

Chris Ignacio, Reclaiming My Voice
Hidemi Takagi, The Bed-Stuy Social 'Photo' Club
Theodore Kerr, What Would an HIV Doula Do?
Aida Šehović, w_i_t_n_e_s_s_(assembly)
Chinatown Art Brigade
Walis Johnson, The Red Line Project
Clarivel Ruiz, Dominicans Love Haitians Movement
Noemi Segarra, Cuerpo y Ciudad
Aiesha Turman, Black Girl Muse (BGMuseum)
Ranjani Chakraborty & Salvador Muñoz, Say What?! Street Harassment Intervention Strategies
Yvonne Shortt, Women Who Build. Artists Who Own
Stephano Espinoza and Cristobal Guerra Naranja, Sacúdete
Corinne Cappelletti and Eva Perrotta, ro͞odərəl
Piper Anderson, Mass Story Campaign
Olaronke AkinmowoThe Free Black Woman's Library
James AndrewsSpatial Resistance
Victoya VeniseProtect the Art
Lise Brenner, Vox Populi
Sarah Dahnke, Dances for Solidarity
Aricoco, PIPORNOT
New York Times Feminist Reading Group (Jen Kennedy & Liz Linden), The NYTFRG Yearbook
Go! Push Pops (Katie Cercone and Elisa Garcia de la Huerta, with Char Johnson), Diamond Tribe
Chloë Bass, Department of Local Affairs
Torkwase Dyson (Studio South Zero), Shapes We Need, Kitchens We Don't
Benton C Bainbridge with Minou Maguna and Bill Etra, Telematic Etra
Alicia Grullon, Campaign Headquarters
Fantastic Futures, Reading Writing Writing
Konstantin Prishep, The Aquatorium Barge
Melanie Crean, Memories of the Future
Tracy Candido, Youth Food Lab
Daniel Lang/Levitsky, Just Like That
Esther Neff and Yelena Gluzman, Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals and Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theater
Nancy Nowacek, Citizen Bridge