Currently 7 active open calls open to applicants in the UK, 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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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.
In partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch), Delfina Foundation welcomes applications from contemporary visual artists from Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe for a London residency from 28 June to 17 September 2027, during Delfina's open summer season dedicated to independent research. ELIGIBILITY: applicants must be born in one of the six eligible countries (individuals currently based in the UK are not eligible); be seeking to develop their practice through research; be able to explain how an international residency may benefit their career development and local networks; and be proficient in English (the interview is conducted in English). Collectives and duos are advised to put forth one member to be in residence. THE PROGRAMME: alongside time and space to develop their work, residents get guided visits to museums, galleries, non-profits, artist-run spaces and studios, plus trips to institutions outside London; opportunities to meet artists, curators, academics and researchers through organised presentations, studio visits, events and meals; professional development including presentations and crits, portfolio reviews and mentoring; and collaborative exchange between residents through informal gatherings and meals. APPLY via the online application form (Cognito Forms, save-and-resume supported); Delfina strongly recommends reading the Guidance Notes document carefully before starting. All applicants notified by mid-November 2026. Deadline Sunday 4 October 2026, 23:59 BST.
The Elephant Trust, founded by Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, funds experimental visual art in the UK and is one of the few no-fee UK funds for individual artists with a live deadline this autumn; the round opened 18 September 2026. It funds making new work and realising exhibitions and is historically sympathetic to experimental and unconventional projects, so media and installation work is fundable even though the Trust is an art fund rather than an art-tech institution. WHAT YOU GET: grants of up to GBP 5,000, with typical awards between GBP 2,000 and GBP 5,000; projects with a total budget exceeding GBP 30,000 are not supported. ELIGIBILITY: individual fine artists and small organisations and galleries, with projects taking place in the UK; students and educational studies are excluded; successful applicants must wait two years before reapplying. APPLICATION: direct to the Trust per its apply page. DEADLINE: 18 October 2026.
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 17th Open City Documentary Festival takes place at venues across London in April 2027, presenting international contemporary and retrospective non-fiction film, audio and cross-media work alongside filmmaker Q&As, panels, talks and workshops. The festival nurtures experimentation within the expanded field of non-fiction cinema, from artists' moving image to documentary, the essay film, audio and cross-media works; recent artists screened include Sky Hopinka, Onyeka Igwe, Luke Fowler, Ana Vaz, Jessica Sarah Rinland and Morgan Quaintance. ELIGIBILITY: non-fiction film and video, cross-platform projects and audio works completed after 1 January 2026; no strict premiere requirement, but works not yet publicly screened in London are prioritized. All selected filmmakers receive screening fees: GBP 275 for works over 60 minutes, GBP 140 for works over 40 minutes, GBP 70 for works under 40 minutes, GBP 100 for cross-platform projects (all incl. VAT). Submissions via FilmFreeway with tiered entry fees (lower before the early deadline). EARLY DEADLINE: 25 September 2026. FINAL DEADLINE: 27 November 2026; all entrants notified by 22 February 2027.
The British Council's standing Travel Grant Fund helps early to mid-career UK filmmakers and XR creatives represent their work abroad, build networks, reach new audiences and raise the international profile of new and emerging UK film and immersive talent. Supported by BFI National Lottery funding in partnership with BFI NETWORK and the BFI International Fund. WHAT IT FUNDS: travel to attend international film festivals, showcases, training and development labs, and co-production forums, across five strands: short film festival grants, feature film festival grants, interactive/XR grants (including VR, immersive storytelling experiences and installations), lab grants and co-production forum grants. AMOUNTS: short and feature festival grants GBP 150 to 1,500 (typically up to GBP 750); XR travel-only grants GBP 150 to 1,500; large XR grants GBP 1,500 to 5,000; lab grants up to GBP 6,000; co-production forum grants up to GBP 2,000. WHO CAN APPLY: UK residents or citizens aged 18+; applicants can be directors, producers or writers attached to the selected project. KEY CONDITIONS: the festival, lab or forum must appear on the British Council's Key Lists of eligible events, and the project must be registered on the British Council's UK Project Database. DEADLINE: rolling, no fixed deadlines; submit at least two weeks before the event starts (retrospective applications for past events are not accepted). Free to apply.
The Audience Projects Fund distributes GBP 19.7 million of National Lottery money over three years to widen UK audiences for film and immersive work, covering exhibition, distribution, festivals, touring programmes and sector-support initiatives. It reopened in November 2025 and runs continuously with no closing date, which makes it one of the more accessible large BFI pots for organisations working on the audience-facing rather than production side. AWARDS are tiered: small pilot projects receive GBP 10,000 to GBP 20,000, while full projects can receive GBP 20,000 to GBP 500,000 per year, with immersive projects permitted to include up to GBP 150,000 of production cost inside that envelope. ELIGIBILITY is strictly institutional. Applicants must be legally constituted organisations centrally managed in the UK and not more than 50% foreign-owned. Eligible types include limited companies (not classed as 'large' under the Companies Act 2006), community interest companies, LLPs, UK local or statutory authorities, and registered UK charities or trusts. Individual practitioners cannot apply. Applicants must evidence experience in marketing, festivals, distribution, immersive installations, cultural programming, touring or sector support. TIMING: there are no deadlines but lead times are enforced. Single-film distribution projects must apply at least 10 weeks before release; all other projects at least 16 weeks before the project starts.