DISABILITY ARTS + DREAMING FELLOWSHIP
OPEN CALL 2026
Applications are due Sunday, Oct 5th, 2025 at 11:59 ET.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION - 3 dazzling and ripply large blobbed orbs dance and float together across a colorful horizontal page. The first orb on the left is very round and is a reflective smearing of hot pinks and oranges. The next orb is long and wavy on its right side. It is full of shiny purples. The 3rd orb peeks out from the right bottom corner. It is glimmering and glitching in red oranges, yellows and splashes of gold. Each orb has multiple small rounded handles. Some of the handles have rays of color beaming from them. They float together across a heavily textured speckled and streaked background that is a cool light blue streaked with greens on the left side and very speckled reds on a warm orange color. Squarish curved shiny orange and red orange shapes free float with the orbs. Some are very close to us and some fade in the distance. Large bold and purple wavy floating letters are filed with bright yellow tiny dots. The letters stretch across the middle of the page horizontally in a lond slinky and contrast colored bubble saying Disability Arts Fellowship.
Our open call invites self identifying disabled artists, organizers, creative thinkers, collectives, beginners, and dreamers to submit any kind of disability centered project in its very beginning stage.
Our Culture Push Disability Arts + Dreaming Fellowship is a one year Fellowship without a specific theme. We are interested in supporting mixed abilities and civically engaged Disability Culture and dreams.
Thanks for sharing your work with us!
The Fellowship for Utopian Practice serves as the umbrella program for the Disability Arts + Dreaming Fellowship, and follows the same guidelines. Please read the FELLOWSHIP GUIDELINES before beginning your application.
Open Call Timeline
Open Call deadline Monday, October 4, 2025 at 11:59 PM ET
All applicants will be notified by mid-December 2025
First Fellowship meetings will be in January 2026
Continued Culture Push support and strategizing from January 2026 - January 2027
Please get in touch with moira for accessibility support. I’m happy to work out accessibility together and make any part of the submission process more accessible for you, thanks! A link to moira’s email is here.
The Disability Arts + Dreaming Fellowship embraces our historical and lived experiences from the past and into the future. It supports the processes of cultivating and trying out new ideas through civic engagement and co-thinking through emergent disability cultural strategies and:
Integrating Access as Art or collective accessibility into your work or into existing systems and/or methodologies.
Growing your voice and making viable plans for sparking more emergent Disability Culture and Justice within the 5 boroughs of NYC in NYC.
The Fellowship supports the processes of thinking through ideas with our staff and with current and past Fellows, as well as a Thought Partner and mentors in the field.
Continued Culture Push support that includes access check ins, co-thinking and strategizing meetings from January 2026 to January 2027.
Disability Arts ideas about emergent accessibility, access as art, DIT (Do It Together) access, relational access, creative access, creative high tech to low fi virtual accessibility–any way that access as an integral and creative expression can be woven into disability arts interests us!
*DIT (Do It Together)" is another way of doing "DIY (Do It Yourself)" that fosters partnerships, co-creation and an appreciation of collective success and interdependence rather than just individual achievement.
The Fellowship for Utopian Practice
The Fellowship for Utopian Practice is a testing ground for untested and new ideas that aim to create positive social change through civic engagement and horizontal learning opportunities. Through the Fellowship for Utopian Practice, Culture Push serves artists by providing creative, analytical, and logistical tools in the creation of truly transformative projects. Pre-existing performances, established projects, and fully funded works are not eligible to apply. Learn more about our Guidelines, and how to apply here.
We are currently also accepting applications for the FELLOWSHIP FOR UTOPIAN PRACTICE, the CLIMATE JUSTICE FELLOWSHIP, and the DISABILITY ARTS + DREAMING FELLOWSHIP.
[[Disability Statement]]
At Culture Push, we center Disability Justice as a way of moving together across disability, race, sexuality, gender, and class. We do this to work collectively to expand on civic engagement for artistic and human needs.
Disability Justice for us is always emergent and full of interdependent ecologies. We embrace and connect with Sins Invalid 10 Principles of Disability Justice. A link to the 10 Principles of Disability Justice is here.
We have centered and continue to center, organize and offer disability events for and with mixed abilities communities and people. Our disability support is part of each of our Fellowships equally. What we mean is that if you self identify as a person with disabilities you are supported by us no matter which Fellowship you apply for or receive. Our desire is to meet you in the best ways we can and work out accessibility with and for you together. Creating accessibility is an act of intimacy and grace that is flexible and interdependent. It is something we co-create at the beginning of your Fellowship and is an ongoing process and relationship we continue with you throughout your Fellowship with us. It is intentional and a vital part of our ever growing Disability Culture at Culture Push.
By disability we mean any person self-identifying as disabled. At Culture Push, Disability can be, but is not limited to; SICK, Spoonie, ILL, Chronically Ill, Blind, Low Sighted, DEAF, HOH, MAD, Intellectual Disabilities, Chemical Disabilities, TBI, Cognitive Disabilities, Neurodivergent.
We often use the word Crip at Culture Push. We do this to reclaim the word cripple and to prevent ranking disabilities as we collectively work towards equity. Crip is short for cripple. It is a term historically used to stigmatize and oppress disabled people. Disability Justice often uses Crip as a way to reclaim the word cripple. Please do not use the word Crip to identify a person, people or group unless they give you permission to.
We support mixed abilities arts, organizing, and events. Supporting mixed abilities is complex and important. It “asks us to identify and bridge between different capacities, orientations and relationships of power with people of different disabilities, across race, sexuality, gender, class and so on.” From SKIN, TOOTH, AND BONE The Basis of Movement is Our People, A Disability Justice Primer by Sins Invalid, page 65.
What is Disability Art? How is it civically engaged?
Disability Arts are created by disabled people, there is no single definition of Disability Arts practices that completely captures disability arts or disability justice. But it is a specific arts practice centering disabled creatives and/or communities making works that express our identities as disabled people. Another dimension of our work moves to both individually and collectively express our disability culture. Disability culture comes with unique experiences, perspectives and shared values.
By disability arts culture Culture Push means people self-identifying as disabled and is not limited to SICK, Spoonie, ILL, Chronically Ill, Blind, Low Sighted, DEAF, HOH, MAD, Intellectual Disabilities, Chemical Disabilities,TBI, Cognitive Disabilities, Neurodivergent, Disabled Communities. Everyone has different access protocols, everyone has different communal enactments. These are vital cultural contracts that we have with one another and are often witnessed in our creative works and often is the work.
In response to our disability culture, how do we work towards manifesting disability culture? How is it civically engaged? Culture is a manifestation collectively expressed through the arts, history, language, customs and practices. Many of the accessibility practices that we currently use have been integrated into our disability arts practices and our creative expressions. Both are meaningful and practical. These have also been advocated for by disability communities or have emerged from disability grassroots organizing. Access practices like these intentionally allow disability to shape culture rather than access being a way to move disabled people into a normative practice. Many of our works tell the stories found in disability rights, justice and access and help form disability culture. We can’t untangle disability culture from disability rights, justice and access. Access weaves our lived experiences with disability justice and rights. Access can be mobilizing, beautiful and unexpected. Disability Arts and access are politically and civically engaged expressions of our lived experiences and disability culture
What does Process-Based mean?
Processed based working and thinking means giving yourself permission to slow down, take time to think and contemplate, ask questions, dream vibrantly, play, incubate ideas, try them out, make mistakes, try ideas out again, critically analyze ideas, consider factors like feasibility, practicality, and alignment with goals or constraints, try different approaches, challenge conventions, and create emergent strategies. It also means assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each idea, and determining which ideas feel the best and have the most potential. AS disabled people we often live
What is Civic Engagement?
At Culture Push, we define civic engagement as collaboration and group learning through active and participatory experiences. It is collective activism and advocacy working to bring about political or social change through increasing public awareness of and support for specific causes. Past Fellows works have engaged with Prison Abolition, Trans Rights, Black Joy and Liberation, Disability Justice and Climate Justice, to name a few.