Currently 5 active paid grants, fellowships and residencies taking place in Austria, across AI, arts, film, journalism, research, tech and cross-disciplinary practice. Many are open to applicants of any nationality; check each entry for residency and citizenship requirements. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
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In Listening is the renamed successor to the CTM Radio Lab, after more than a decade of collaboration between CTM Festival and Germany's public radio Deutschlandfunk Kultur, with support from Austria's ORF, zeroing in on sound-focused experiences. This open call is for works strongly grounded in experimental sound practices and audio art and driven by conceptual approaches or sonic narratives, exploring the blurred edges between sound, noise, music, storytelling, poetry, and documenting, where sound is the main medium. Works should respond to the CTM 2027 theme 'Process...ing', with active listening informing the proposals. Applications should describe how the work could be developed for two complementary outputs: a LIVE EVENT at CTM 2027 and a RADIO BROADCAST on Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Oe1/ORF. At CTM, works are presented in the silent green Kuppelhalle with an intimate setup, the audience seated around the performer(s) and surrounded by a 6.1-channel PA (creative use of fewer channels, stereo, or mono is welcome; minimal lighting and scenography or performances in the dark are suitable, but video and complex scenography are out of scope). For radio/podcast, proposals should consider the individual listening experience (a recording of the performance is not sufficient); the broadcast is a 40-55 minute piece aired in a late-night slot to a largely German-speaking, non-specialist audience. Works premiere at CTM 2027 (22-31 January 2027, Berlin), are broadcast in Deutschlandfunk Kultur's Klangkunst programme in Spring 2027, and presented via ORF (Oe1 Zeit-Ton or Blaue Stunde / Kunstradio) and/or ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst in Graz (Autumn 2027), then available for streaming for at least one year. BUDGET: two selected works each receive EUR 6,000; winners give up to two performances at CTM. Group proposals are possible but should keep a modest travel budget. JURY: Jan Rohlf (CTM), Marcus Gammel (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), Anna Soucek (ORF Oe1), and one independent artist. TIMELINE: deadline 6 September 2026 at 23:59 Berlin time; winners announced mid-October 2026; remote production late October 2026 to January 2027. APPLY (in English, PDF, max 20MB) with a project description including rough budget (max 4 pages), technical requirements, and CV; questions to in_listening@ctm-festival.de. No application fee.
The city of Linz awards project-related working grants to sustain and develop its art scene, in line with the Linz cultural development plan and the city's status as a UNESCO City of Media Arts. The stated aims are enabling the further development of artistic practice, supporting artistic careers, and securing a professional artistic existence and innovative production in Linz. Each scholarship is worth EUR 5,000 over five months, with EUR 30,000 available in total this year. DISCIPLINES: fine arts and photography, literature, music, performing arts, interdisciplinary art forms, media art and film. WHAT TO SUBMIT: a concrete artistic project, which may be an independent work, a series of works, or the continuation of an earlier series or project. Preparatory work and concept phases are also eligible. Projects already funded by the City of Linz cannot be submitted, and only one submission per person per year is permitted. ELIGIBILITY: artists of any citizenship who can demonstrate that their centre of work is in Linz, in the form of a permanent site for their artistic work, and who have a sufficient connection to the city. SELECTION CRITERIA: the expert jury assesses sufficient Linz connection, innovative artistic potential, independent artistic expression, a clearly recognisable conception of the artistic intention in the proposal, and the quality and continuity of the artistic work. REPORTING OBLIGATION: within three months of the scholarship ending, a written progress report of 1,800 to 5,400 characters including spaces must be submitted with supporting documentation, and after review it is published on the City of Linz website. The project need not be finished, but significant progress must be evident. If no report is submitted, or the report shows insufficient progress, the scholarship must be repaid under the City of Linz General Funding Guidelines. REQUIRED DOCUMENTS: the completed online application form, a project description of up to 10 pages including the innovative approach and planned schedule, a biography with catalogue of works and any exhibition or presentation list, an artistic portfolio, and references and press reviews. NOTE: the online form and the call documents are in German. Contact: lkf.kb@mag.linz.at. Deadline 7 September 2026.
VBKÖ, the Austrian Association of Wom*n Artists founded in 1910, invites proposals for its annual programme running March 2027 to February 2028. The call reads the present moment through the resurgence of authoritarianism, fascism, militarisation, colonial violence and extractive capitalism, and the parallel privatisation of care and criminalisation of solidarity. Drawing on María Galindo's framing of feminism as a project of social transformation and Sara Ahmed's account of feminist work beginning with refusal, the programme treats alternative ways of living as something rehearsed collectively through organising, creating, caring, listening, remembering and struggling. VBKÖ seeks a programme of practices that nurture communal care and build a platform for collective rehearsals: proposals that allow for tenderness, that are not afraid of ugly feelings and different truths, and that explore how contemporary queer and feminist perspectives resonate across artistic, social and political movements. FORMAT REQUIREMENT: only exhibition formats bringing together multiple artists, collectives or collaborative practices are accepted. Solo exhibitions, individual presentations and projects centred on a single artist's work are explicitly not supported. Proposals that activate the exhibition through public programming (screenings, performances, workshops, lectures and other events) are encouraged. Regular opening hours are Fridays and Saturdays 2pm to 6pm; any additional hours must be arranged and staffed by the selected group. The association acknowledges that its own history is marked by violence, exclusion and discrimination on the basis of religion, class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity, and states that it actively opposes all forms of discrimination including trans-exclusionary radical feminism. APPLICATION: a single PDF (max 5MB) with a programme description (max 2 pages, images welcome, English or German, including preferred dates and duration), a CV and biography for every participant (max 1 page each), a financial plan (Fair Pay encouraged), technical requirements, and contact details including email, mobile number and main residence; three high-resolution images of work or exhibition sketches sent within the email or via a download link, labelled with artist name, work title, year and proposal title (video links may be included in the proposal). Send to opencall@vbkoe.org with the subject line 'Open Call + your proposal title'. Incomplete applications will not be considered. A shortlist is compiled by the VBKÖ team and final selections are made by the VBKÖ board with an external jury member experienced in contemporary art, activism and community building; shortlisted applicants may be asked to present to the jury. Results are announced at the beginning of October 2026. Deadline 10 September 2026, 23:59. Free to apply.
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.
The European Media Art Platform (EMAP/EMARE) is a network of leading European media-art organisations offering fully funded two-month production residencies for artists working with digital media, including media art, bio art and robotic art. Each residency provides a EUR 4,000 grant to the applying artist (including subsistence), a EUR 4,000 project budget, host-provided accommodation, travel covered according to EU ceilings, and access to technical facilities and media labs; a collaborating artist receives an additional EUR 2,000 (EUR 6,000 total for a duo). Residencies take place at one of 15 host institutions across Austria, France, Slovakia, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Germany and Poland. ELIGIBILITY: applicants must be EU residents or taxpayers in an EU member state, or residents/taxpayers of one of the eligible non-EU countries (Netherlands-based artists qualify). Undergraduate and Master's students are not eligible; PhD candidates and emerging artists of any age and academic background may apply. IMPORTANT: applicants must apply as a duo or collective, or propose a collaborative project, rather than as a purely solo applicant. The 2027 open call runs from 3 September 2026 to 6 November 2026 at 14:00 CET. Apply online at call.emare.eu. No application fee.