The Most Unique Artist Residencies Accepting Applications Right Now
Not all artist residencies follow the same formula. For artists seeking something beyond the traditional studio residency, there are a growing number of programmes offering unusual contexts for research, experimentation, and exchange. Whether you want to go somewhere remote, initiate a new collaboration, or immerse yourself in a unique landscape, there are a huge plethora of opportunities out there.
We've gathered a selection of some of the most unique artist residencies on ArtConnect.com currently accepting applications, with upcoming deadlines for international artists working across disciplines.
Centre for Multispecies Relations and Future Ecologies | Residency
Two artists or an artist duo are invited for a 62-day fully funded residency in Palermo, in autumn 2026.
Set on a 1,500 sqm garden marked by years of exploitative use, the residency asks how artistic practice can participate in ecological and multispecies care. Artists are invited to treat non-human forms of life like plants, soil organisms, insects, and whatever else persists on this site not as subject matter, but as collaborators.
Through extended fieldwork, they will develop interventions that engage with human and non-human relations and-or the climate crisis, supported throughout by mentors, scientists, and researchers from the Centre and its network.
They are welcoming applications across all mediums and disciplines - installation, sound, performance, video, food art, participatory practice, and beyond. Research-based and interdisciplinary practices are especially encouraged.
Rewards: Accommodation, 440 Euro travel budget, 1860 Euro allowance, production budget, and final public event
Fine Acts | Global Artist Residency
TED, the global platform for ideas and storytelling, and POSCA, a creative brand by uni Brands Corporation, are launching a new kind of artist residency: a globally distributed cohort of artists working across different geographies, cultures, and communities, united by a shared drive to shape public life through art.
For this program, there is no single location. No central studio. Instead:
Selected artists work within their own communities
They follow a shared creative constraint – a unifying conceptual framework around repair, hope, and beauty
Projects unfold in public space
Community participation is key part of the work
Process matters as much as outcome
This year’s residency theme, Visible Mending, explores repair as a creative and civic act. In 2026, four artists will be selected to develop community-rooted public interventions to be implemented in 2027.
Rewards: 15,000 USD grant
Image: Daniel Shipilov
Arteles Creative Center | Silence Awareness Existence
Are you someone who needs peace and quiet to really focus? This might just be the opportunity you’re looking for.
Silence Awareness Existence is a thematic, transdisciplinary residency program in Finland for artists, writers, researchers and creative minds. Taking place at the heart of the Northern winter, the conditions are excellent for creative contemplation, solitary introspection, concentrating intensively on your work, thinking and being, as well as for sharing experiences and ideas with other, similarly oriented minds. There are even two no speaking days a week.
The month-long residencies will take place in January, February and March 2027.
Costs: $1,950
What’s Provided: Accommodation, studio, and program
Misk Art Institute | The Masaha Residency
This three-month visual arts residency in Riyadh, explores what is carried over and what is lost each time experience passes through a tool.
Misk Art Residencies aims to support artistic development and practice by promoting the possibilities of meaningful exchange between the local community and the global cultural landscape. The Masaha Residency is designed to cultivate the art sector by facilitating discourse, research, and experimentation around themes that concern the local community.
This cycle invites artists to examine what experience becomes when it passes through the tools we use to create, translate, and share it, and what, in that process, changes.
The program is open to full-time visual and digital artists from all artistic disciplines with 3+ years of fine arts experience and exhibiting history.
Rewards: Accommodation, travel, visas, studio, and production budget
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Grand Canyon Conservancy | Residency Program
Ever wanted to make work in one of the natural wonders of the world? Well now you have the chance!
Founded in 2020, Grand Canyon Conservancy’s award-winning residency program invites artists, scientists, historians, and educators to live on-site, pursue place-based research and engage the public in meaningful programs that deepen our understanding of the rich environmental, spiritual, and cultural impact Grand Canyon has on the world.
Rewards: Accommodation, $750 weekly stipend, $250 travel stipend, supply reimbursement of up to $300, and more
CAN SERRAT | Walking Practices Laboratory 2027
If you’re someone who works best on the go or with others, Walking Practices Laboratory is perfect for you.
This residency program proposes a sustained period of immersion in which walking is understood as a generative practice for perceiving, mapping, and narrating place through embodied experience. Over several weeks, participants will develop an ongoing process of research, exchange, and production, combining sensory exploration, ecological observation, site-responsive creation, and reflective practices.
The landscape of Montserrat functions as both terrain and collaborator: a living archive that is traversed, interpreted, and collectively reimagined through shared movement.
While Can Serrat and its collaborators propose a semi-structured framework, the laboratory is built through active participation, inviting participants to share methods, approaches, and working processes within a context of collective experimentation.
Costs: €433-€2730 depending on room type and length of stay.
What’s Provided: Accommodation, group dinners, workspace, and more
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