Image Description: Delicately drawn shapes and textures dance across a white background. The shapes range from long, elliptical pointed shapes, round spiky tufts, thin oblong clusters, large round hollow fluffs and strings of tiny pointed ellipses. Each pale yellow, green or blue shape is a flower of leaf drawn with black lines. In the left upper corner, floating above the delicately drawn leaves and flowers is a small pale yellow banner with thin green letters saying: CULTURE PUSH. Slightly below it, a larger medium pale green banner stretches across the page. The large banner has white letters saying: Fellowship for Utopian Practice.
Applications are now closed.
As of 2024, we streamlined our application process to once a year, in the fall. In 2023, alongside the Fellowship for Utopian Practice and the Black Utopian Fellowship, we launched our new Disability Arts Curatorial Fellowship. Applications for the Disability Arts Curatorial Fellowship are now closed. Climate Justice Fellowship applications are set to resume in Fall 2025.
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.
