Currently 3 active visual and media arts grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in the UK. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Almost every entry is funded; a few notable unpaid open calls and festival submissions are included as clearly flagged exceptions. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
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Waag Futurelab invites artists, theatre makers, choreographers, dancers, game designers and other creative practitioners to engage directly with seven experimental generative AI Enablers being co-created with technologists and dance, theatre and gaming professionals. The call is an invitation into the development process: selected artists get access to the technologies, datasets, interfaces and assumptions that shape these systems while they are still being built. Rather than testing whether the systems work, artists are asked to interrogate why they work the way they do, who they are designed for, what forms of creativity they enable or constrain, and what assumptions about culture, intelligence, authorship, labour, bodies, audiences and society are embedded in them. Waag is looking for individuals and collectives willing to move beyond adoption into investigation, and welcomes proposals that are speculative, critical, poetic, provocative, humorous, performative, constructive or disruptive, including work that challenges, misuses, reimagines, hacks, subverts or plays with the tools, exposes hidden biases, questions environmental costs, or imagines alternative technological futures. THE SEVEN AI ENABLERS, each requiring an on-site visit to its technology partner: the Generic Procedural Content Generation Enabler (text-to-3D assets and avatars, CERTH, Greece); the Data-Driven Cultural Content Adaptation Enabler (audience-aware creative content ideation with ranked candidate ideas, CERTH, Greece); the Cross-Domain Audience Engagement Analytics Enabler (turning heterogeneous cultural participation data into interpretable engagement signals, The Audience Agency, Warrington, UK); the Dance Style Analysis and Generation Enabler (dance video into virtual 3D choreography, dissected into body, effort, shape and space components, Centre of Excellence for Research & Innovation, Cyprus); the Immersive Design Integration Enabler for Dance & Theatre (NLP-driven XR environments with speech-to-3D scene editing, Cyprus); the Music-to-Movement Translation Enabler (audio into a time-aligned feature set spanning genre classification, emotional valence-arousal analysis, rhythm extraction and latent-space projection, feeding motion generation, spatial audio and visual choreography, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece); and the Adaptive Narrative Enabler for Games & Theatre (an evolutionary AI trained on creator-written story elements that generates infinite story variations, explicitly rejecting LLMs because of their dependence on copyrighted or public-domain corpora that encode 19th and early 20th century sexism, racism and imperialism, CAUSA Creation, Austria). ELIGIBILITY: artists, designers, creative technologists, theatre makers, dancers, choreographers and game designers, as individuals or collectives; applicants must hold a European VAT number. An info session with live demonstrations of the AI Enablers runs 31 July 2026, 10:00 to 11:30 CEST (meeting ID 995 7016 2341). Applications go through Homerun using the official Application Template, uploaded as a PDF; read the Guide for Applicants, which contains the full Enabler descriptions, before applying. Questions: zoenie at waag dot org. The AI Enablers and this call are part of the Horizon Europe project HAMLET, which aims to make generative AI accessible to cultural organisations of all sizes. Closes 30 September 2026, 23:59 CEST. Free to apply.
Whose Archive is it Anyway? is the first in a three-part series of events at The Photographers' Gallery exploring the future of archives and archiving. This one-day event on Friday 16 April 2027 kickstarts the conversation with commissioned talks addressing what it means to make an archive today, who decides what an archive consists of, who creates an archive, who an archive is for, and who has access. The gallery welcomes submissions of real-life experiences rather than academic papers that challenge or answer these or other points related to the future of archives. SUGGESTED TOPICS: artist and photographers' legacies; institutional archives; memory (forgotten or lost histories made visible again); truth within archives (who is telling the stories and how); ownership (who has the authority to tell stories, who owns the images and their stories); relationships between those who create archives and those who use them; radical, non-traditional archives that redesign how stories are gathered and held to safeguard living memories; family archives; reclaimed photographic archives; counter archives that question dominant historical narratives; grassroots archives; technologies that reduce barriers to archives while safeguarding material; digital preservation and digitisation; and dialogic archives. ELIGIBILITY: open to all, especially those with experience of working with archives and the stories within them; applicants must be 18 or older and available to attend The Photographers' Gallery in London on 16 April 2027 to speak at the event. Selected speakers receive a fee of GBP 200 and will be notified by 18 January 2027. Questions to archive@tpg.org.uk. Deadline 1 November 2026, 11:59pm GMT.
The BFI Doc Society Features Production Fund (delivered via BFI with Doc Society as delegate partner) supports UK filmmakers producing non-fiction feature films intended for theatrical release. Two strands: Directions (first- or second-time directors) and Momentum (established talent). AMOUNT: up to £150,000 non-recoupable grant (the total Doc Society contribution per project cannot exceed £150,000). ELIGIBILITY: UK-based filmmakers, both emerging and established directors; experienced and debut producers eligible; projects must meet at least three of six stated priorities: equity/diversity, audience impact, talent development, creative risk, UK-wide access, and environmental sustainability. PROCESS: two-stage — submit an Expression of Interest, then a Full Application if invited. Rolling intake year-round. Opened May 2026. APPLY via BFI Doc Society website. Contact: hellobfi@docsociety.org.