Currently 14 active fellowships open to applicants in Worldwide, across AI, arts, film, journalism, research, tech and cross-disciplinary practice. 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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The inaugural Kennan Institute Digital Fellowship promotes original scholarship and quality non-fiction writing about Russia and the former Soviet Union, with an emphasis on work that has policy relevance. Ten fellowships are awarded per year, and AT LEAST FOUR POSITIONS ARE RESERVED FOR RESEARCHERS PURSUING TOPICS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES, MEDICINE, TECHNOLOGY OR RELATED FIELDS, which is the route by which a technology-focused project fits this call. The programme aims to give participants time, professional resources and support while bringing their work to a wider public and to the Washington-based policy community, and to build a cohort network that continues into the alumni body. Each fellow receives a monthly stipend of USD 2,000, mentorship and consultation from the Kennan community of experts where applicable, six virtual webinars tailored to the cohort's needs, and membership of the alumni network. ELIGIBILITY: intended for individuals with several years of experience working on, studying or otherwise examining Russia and/or broader Eurasia; applicants must have a good working knowledge of English, as the fellowship is conducted only in English and any publications produced for the Kennan Institute appear first in English with possible later translation into regional languages. The programme runs entirely virtually from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027; the Institute does not cover travel-related expenses including visas. Supported by the Lounsbery Foundation and the U.S. Russia Foundation. Deadline 14 August 2026, 17:00 EST. NOTE: 'digital' here describes the virtual format, not the subject matter, so this fits the desk only if your project is itself about technology, data or science.
The Beinecke Library Fellowship Program offers competitive short-term fellowships to support research projects that substantively engage with Yale Library Special Collections materials. WHO CAN APPLY: academic and independent scholars, locally and globally, with or without an institutional affiliation; the library explicitly welcomes applicants regardless of institutional association, race, cultural background, ability, sexual orientation, gender or socioeconomic status. Applications using traditional archival and bibliographic research methods are encouraged, and so are creative, interdisciplinary and non-traditional approaches to working with the collections, which makes this a live option for artists and writers whose practice is research-driven. WHAT YOU GET: USD 5,000 per month for an onsite research visit of between two weeks and two months, paid at the start of the fellowship whenever possible (international fellows should expect payment to take several weeks); fellows pay their own taxes on the award. TIMELINE: applications for the 2027-2028 awards opened 1 June 2026 and close 15 August 2026, via Interfolio; all decisions are notified by 31 January 2027; research must be conducted between 1 July 2027 and 30 June 2028, and awards cannot be deferred.
An eight-week full-time empirical AI alignment research programme run by the AI Alignment Foundation, with a dedicated research manager, mentorship from senior researchers, compute and infrastructure, culminating in a Demo Day where fellows present their work. Fellows receive a USD 12,000 stipend paid in two installments plus a compute budget. The programme is fully remote for the research period; Demo Day is hybrid in Los Angeles and travel is covered for fellows who attend in person. ELIGIBILITY: open to all career stages, including recent PhDs, graduate students, self-taught researchers and career-changers, but candidates need a strong machine learning background, demonstrated engagement with alignment research, prior independent research output, and the ability to work autonomously. Non-US applicants are welcome provided they can make Pacific Time meetings; current graduate students may apply if they can confirm availability. This is explicitly a technical programme: the foundation says policy-focused applicants should not apply. SELECTION: all applications are reviewed, qualified candidates advance to a technical test, and finalists are interviewed, with decisions expected by early September. Applications close 17 August 2026 (Anywhere on Earth); the programme starts 8 September 2026.
A $5,000 fellowship to spend six weeks turning a very large Canadian public archive into something new. THE MATERIAL: Internet Archive Canada's Government Publications collection, part of the Democracy's Library project, holding over 104,000 text items, roughly 22.1 million scanned pages and about 48.25 TB of Canadian public-record material, browsable at archive.org/details/governmentpublications. WHAT TO BUILD: deliberately open-ended. The call names a search tool that answers a real question with page-level citations, a timeline tracing one policy across decades of government language, and a sonic or visual piece built from archival material, but explicitly invites work nobody has thought of yet. The requirements are that it is useful, that it is imaginative, and that the code is open source when it is done. ORIGIN: the fellowship came out of conversations between BC + AI's Kris Kruger and IAC executive director Andrea Mills about treating a public archive as material for new work rather than only something to preserve. IAC brings the archive, BC + AI brings a community of builders used to working in public. ELIGIBILITY: anyone, anywhere in the world; one builder is selected. APPLICATION: a specific project description grounded in the collection, a phase-by-phase work plan for the six weeks, and a success metric, submitted at bc-ai.ca/fellowship/apply. KEY DATES: applications close 21 August 2026 at 11:59pm Pacific; fellow selected by 31 August; build runs 1 September to mid-October; showcase at Futureproof Festival in Vancouver on 28 October 2026 if the project is ready.
The Sundance Institute Episodic Program is an entry point for emerging to mid-career writers and creators working across all scripted series platforms, combining a lab experience with customised support to move projects and careers forward. The Episodic Lab lets writers workshop an original pilot and develop their writing and pitching skills: working with showrunners, producers and executives, fellows take part in one-on-one story meetings, pitching sessions, craft workshops and writers rooms. Up to ten applicants are selected, either for the in-person Lab (preceded by virtual workshops) or for a fully virtual Intensive with a creative advisor. ELIGIBILITY: applicants must be 18 or older; the script must be the applicant's original creation or adapted from optioned source material and written in English; the draft must be revised or new, not already produced, not sold to a third party and not distributed online; and applicants cannot have previously had an episodic project (pilot or pitch) produced by a studio or network. Open to international and U.S. participants, subject to travel guidelines. Up to two writers per project may participate, with one named as primary applicant. APPLICATION: submitted via FilmFreeway, including writer bios (250 words each), a series logline (50 words), pilot synopsis (500 words), one-page series overview (500 words), personal statement (250 words), community connection, thematic statement (250 words), characters and core relationships (250 words), episodic vision, optional video samples (up to three links, 10 minutes total), and the full pilot script as a PDF in standard screenplay format. Demographic questions are optional and do not affect consideration. Candidates may submit up to three applications, with a separate application and USD 50 fee for each project. Submissions opened 13 July 2026 and close 25 August 2026 at 6:00 p.m. PT. Finalists are notified by email through FilmFreeway around mid to late March 2027 (FilmFreeway lists 31 March 2027), and the list of selected writers and projects is published at sundance.org/epi after 15 April 2027. Finalists must return a Fellow Agreement, a Participation Agreement and any other required documents within five days. Questions: episodicprogram@sundance.org.
Brazil's longest-running artist residency, on the island of Itaparica across the bay from Salvador, hosting six to eight artists per session for roughly eight weeks. Open to all creative disciplines and, unusually for this region, to all nationalities, which makes it one of the few genuinely international residencies in Latin America. Sacatar provides full hosting (private room, three meals daily, individual studio, laundry, local logistics and connections) but explicitly does NOT provide a stipend, airfare to Salvador, art materials or discretionary local expenses, so applicants must fund their own travel. Individual artists only; group proposals are not accepted and former Sacatar Fellows may not reapply. COVID vaccination is required. NOTE: there is a USD 25 application fee. Apply through SlideRoom by 28 August 2026. Contact info@sacatar.org.
The Asia in the World Fellowship Programme, run by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, is a nine-month, two-phase fellowship pairing a residency at a partner institution in Asia, Africa, Latin America, or Europe (Phase 1) with six months in residence at IIAS in Leiden, the Netherlands (Phase 2). The programme supports interdisciplinary, humanities- and social-science-based research engaging Asia and its connections with the wider world. SUPPORT during the Leiden phase: EUR 1,250 per month stipend, EUR 1,200 per month housing allowance, and a travel grant; the Phase 1 stipend is provided by the co-host institution. ELIGIBILITY: scholars and researchers worldwide; open internationally. APPLICATIONS open 1 July 2026; deadline 10 September 2026. Apply via the IIAS fellowships page. NOTE: dates confirmed via secondary sources at time of entry (the funder page was not directly reachable); verify before applying.
Short-term international research fellowship for scientists seeking placements at host institutions in participating member countries. Fellowships last 6 to 26 weeks and support international scientific collaboration, research mobility, knowledge exchange and cross-border partnerships. PRIORITY THEMES: sustainable agricultural productivity, climate action, environmental protection, biodiversity conservation, soil health, water resource sustainability, knowledge innovation, sustainable livestock systems, fisheries development and aquaculture sustainability. FUNDING: a travel lump sum, return economy airfare, a weekly subsistence allowance (EUR 600 or EUR 650 by host-country cost of living) and a EUR 165 terminal allowance; insurance, visa fees, lab/bench fees and family or personal costs are not covered. ELIGIBILITY: employed by or affiliated with an institution in a participating country; proposed host institution in a different participating country; at least 4 years of postdoctoral experience (exceptional candidates with equivalent expertise and a strong publication record may also be considered). Applicants must not already hold a position at the host institution, need employer approval and assurance of continued employment or affiliation after the fellowship, and previous fellows may reapply only after a 5-year gap. Applicants confirm country eligibility, secure a host institution and collaboration, prepare a research proposal (objective, scientific relevance, methodology, expected outcomes, 6-26 week timeline, collaboration benefits) and submit supporting documents (CV, publication list, employer approval, host acceptance letter, proof of affiliation).
The Wilson Center, the congressionally chartered nonpartisan policy research institution in Washington DC, awards 10 to 20 research fellowships for its 2027-2028 class. Fellows conduct research and write in their areas of interest while interacting with policymakers in Washington and with other fellows. The Center accepts policy-relevant, nonpartisan proposals that address key foreign policy challenges confronting the United States and the world, and projects must align with at least one of the Center's four scholarship pillars: strategic competition, economic statecraft, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION, and regional scholarship. The technology and innovation pillar is the relevant route for AI governance, emerging technology and digital policy projects, which the Center also supports through its Science and Technology Innovation Program. Fellows work remotely for the duration of the fellowship; the Center covers travel costs for two required trips to Washington DC at the beginning and the conclusion of the term. The stipend is USD 10,000 per month for the twelve-month term, which runs 1 June 2027 to 30 May 2028. ELIGIBILITY: academic candidates need a PhD in hand and either a published book or monograph beyond the dissertation, or a substantial body of research articles (five or more) in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Non-academic applicants (practitioners, journalists, public intellectuals) need at least ten years of relevant experience and a record of substantial policy impact. There is no citizenship restriction, but English proficiency is required. Applications, including letters of recommendation, must be submitted online via Interfolio by 11:59pm ET on 30 September 2026. Questions: fellowships@wilsoncenter.org. NOTE: this is an open-topic foreign policy fellowship, not an AI-specific one; the technology angle depends on how you scope the proposal.
Fellowships supporting enterprise and investigative reporting with a business or economic angle, from the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY. Tech-platform economies, AI labour, data-broker investigations, digital-economy beats and similar tech-and-business stories fit naturally. ELIGIBILITY: working journalists with at least 5 years of professional experience; freelancers and staff are both eligible worldwide. CYCLES: Fall 2026 cycle deadline 12 October 2026; spring cycle expected around April 2027. No application fee.
Robot foundation models (pi-zero, OpenVLA, GR00T and others) are approaching widespread deployment on the back of more than USD 18 billion in funding, and almost nobody is working on their safety. The Physical AI Safety Institute, a new nonprofit founded by Bear Haon and Kaylene Stocking and seeded by a grant from BlueDot Impact, describes itself as a capacity-building organisation growing the community that develops techniques to interpret, align and control robot foundation models. Its research fellowship runs in 12-week cohorts: each fellow works within a stream led by a mentor on a concrete problem in physical AI safety, with mentors drawn from researchers with track records in robot foundation models, mechanistic interpretability, safe control or adversarial robustness for embodied systems. Each cohort ends with a research symposium where fellows present their work. STREAMS: mechanistic interpretability (sparse autoencoders and activation patching for VLA and WAM architectures); adversarial robustness (jailbreaking and prompt injection in the embodied action space); runtime monitoring (detecting when a policy operates outside its competence envelope); sim-to-real safety transfer (do safety behaviours survive deployment on physical hardware); and robot security (cyberattack vectors, data poisoning and supply chain for deployed robot models). WHO SHOULD APPLY: researchers with strong technical foundations in robotics or machine learning and a demonstrated interest in safety; prior safety experience is not required. PROCESS: this stage is an expression of interest, not a full application. The form takes about two minutes and asks you to pick your stream and preferred cohort dates; concrete details including stipend figures and application deadlines are shared through that channel, and neither is published on the site as of listing. PAISI also publishes seven free curriculum modules running from classical robot safety through VLA interpretability, adversarial robustness and runtime monitoring to deployment evaluation, plus a white paper, The Case for Physical AI Safety, at paisi.ai/the-case-for-physical-ai-safety. Contact: bear@paisi.ai.
AIXI Labs is a small London-based non-profit doing AI safety research grounded in algorithmic information theory. Its stated position is that most AI research today is either mathematically clean but narrow, or practical but too opaque for rigorous safety analysis; the lab targets a third category, methods general enough to describe powerful agents and provable enough to support real safety claims, using AIXI (the theoretical model of unbounded artificial superintelligence) and then porting the strongest of those ideas to modern LLM-based agents. The fellowship is a quarterly, rolling programme for researchers who want to work on this agenda under close mentorship from the core team: Cole Wyeth (Founder and Executive Director), Marcus Hutter (Research Director) and Aram Ebtekar (Founding Research Scientist). Fellows pursue a focused research project over roughly a quarter and receive a monthly stipend plus a compute budget for machine-learning work. The fellowship is fully remote, so fellows may work from anywhere in the world or from the London base. RESPONSIBILITIES: pursue a self-directed research project aligned with the lab's algorithmic-information-theoretic approach to AI safety, spanning anything from foundational theory to empirical tests with LLM-based agents; shape the project direction around your own strengths and interests, as the lab supports a range of work within this framework; and contribute papers, blog posts or other written output communicating results to the broader AI safety and ML research communities. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: a research background at the level of a current PhD student (for primarily empirical projects, a master's-level command of the relevant mathematics paired with substantial industry or applied research experience can also qualify); solid grounding in probability, statistics, information theory and reinforcement learning, sufficient to engage seriously with AIXI-style theoretical models (prior expertise in algorithmic information theory or AIXI is NOT required); strong verbal and written communication skills; genuine motivation to reduce existential risk from advanced AI and enthusiasm for the lab's kind of work. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: publications at top ML, AI or theory venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ALT or COLT, though the lab values the strength of your best work over volume; background in algorithmic information theory, computability theory, learning theory or related theoretical computer science; experience fine-tuning, evaluating or red-teaming LLM-based and/or RL agents; prior engagement with the UAI/AIXI community or related fields, including members of the lab's online reading groups. APPLICATIONS are reviewed on a rolling basis and previous applicants remain eligible for later rounds.
Tech Matters, the nonprofit founded by Jim Fruchterman (MacArthur Fellow, Skoll Awardee), is hiring a Project Fellow to work directly with the CEO on ensuring technology better serves the 90% of humanity typically neglected by the commercial tech industry. Project work spans (1) expanding the Better Deal for Data, a practical data-governance standard for the nonprofit sector, by supporting nonprofits adopting and endorsing the standard; (2) prototyping methods for improving LLM and search-engine answers on critical social problems (initial focus: preventing sexual abuse of children); and (3) helping develop an open course based on Jim's recent book Technology for Good (CC-licensed, global release September 2026). REMOTE; open to candidates around the world (US-based hires get health and related insurance). WHAT THEY LOOK FOR: demonstrated interest and 5+ years' experience in tech-enabled organisations; Bachelor's/Master's in CS, data science, MLIS, MBA, or social sciences; familiarity with SaaS platforms; clear and kind writing; comfortable in an early-stage team. NICE TO HAVE: Wikipedia editing, data-governance expertise, additional languages. APPLY by emailing a resume and a real (not LLM-generated) cover letter to jobs@techmatters.org with subject 'Tech for Good Project Fellow - [Your Name]'. The cover letter should explain why this role and mission resonate with you. NOTE: this is a job/fellowship, not a grant; no specific application deadline listed (rolling).
IIE-SRF arranges and funds temporary academic placements for professors, researchers and public intellectuals who face serious threats to their lives, liberty or academic careers, so they can continue research and teaching in safety. Since 2002 it has supported more than 1,000 scholars from 62 countries at over 500 host institutions. ELIGIBILITY: scholars from any country and any academic discipline who hold or held a professorship, research or public-intellectual position and face persecution, conflict or targeted threats. The fund does not support people continuing their own studies, including PhD candidates and others in academic training. Applicants do not need to have a host institution lined up: IIE-SRF works to identify placements, and scholars already outside their home country may still apply. Applications are rolling and reviewed quarterly, so a passed cycle deadline is not a closed door (the July 2026 cut-off fed the September 2026 committee). Programme materials are available in Arabic, Persian, French, Spanish and Turkish. Apply via scholarrescuefund.org.