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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With support from Delfina Foundation's Network of Patrons for Africa, Delfina is offering a six- or twelve-week London residency within its winter 2027 season to curators based in Central and West Africa. ELIGIBILITY: applicants must hold nationality and be based in one of Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, The Gambia or Togo; and must have at least five years of professional curatorial practice in a freelance, academic or institutional context. 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 and engage with artists, curators, academics and researchers through organised presentations, studio visits, events and meals; professional development including presentations and crits, portfolio reviews and mentoring activities to strengthen their practice; and collaborative exchange between residents through informal gatherings and meals. APPLY via the application form on the open call page; Delfina strongly recommends reading the Guidance Notes document carefully before starting. Deadline Sunday 30 August 2026, 23:59 BST.
The Paul Mellon Centre funds scholarship and dissemination in British art, visual culture and architectural history, from the medieval period to the present and across the relevant geographical and cultural contexts. This is the Autumn 2026 round, the first under the Centre's restructured funding scheme announced earlier in 2026, and all grants in the round close together on Monday 14 September 2026 at 23:59 BST. ELIGIBILITY: the Centre's funding is open to INTERNATIONAL applicants, not just UK-based ones (the exceptions are the MA/MPhil Studentship and Doctoral Scholarship, which are not part of this round). Every applicant must show how the award advances their research on British art, visual culture and/or architecture. SUPPORT: general application guidance, an updated FAQ and the Our Funding Focus page set out what the Centre looks for, and there are writeups of previously successful projects. The grants team will take specific questions or arrange a call at grants@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk. No application fee. THIS GRANT: up to GBP 6,000 for organisations producing publications tied to their exhibitions and displays, covering practical publishing costs such as image and production costs.
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 Jerwood Foundation makes grants to UK organisations for public-facing arts activity across theatre, music, dance, visual arts and literature, including artist development programmes, commissions, residencies and projects involving the Jerwood Collection. Awards have historically gone as high as GBP 200,000, though the Foundation states most grants are much smaller. Applications are single-stage: a written proposal of no more than 10 sides of A4 excluding financial statements, sent by email to info@jerwood.org or by post, and it must include a summary sheet giving location, amount requested, timeline and audience figures. Applications missing that summary sheet are rejected automatically. The March 2026 deadline has passed; the next round opens 3 February 2027 at 9am and closes 17 March 2027 at 2pm, with decisions on 28 April 2027 and all applicants notified by 11 May 2027. TIMING RULE: activity funded in that round must start or open to the public between 1 July 2027 and 30 June 2028, so there is a long lead time and retrospective funding is impossible. Grants to individuals are not made, so artists must be supported through a host organisation. Core costs and capital work are explicitly out of scope, which makes this a good fit for discrete festivals, exhibitions and public programmes.
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 National Lottery Open Fund for Organisations is Creative Scotland's main open-access grant for constituted arts, creative and cultural organisations, and it is genuinely rolling with no deadlines. It supports a specific one-off project or production, creative research and development, or a longer-term programme of work, and can also fund business sustainability and organisational development costs. Eligible organisations can apply for GBP 1,000 to 100,000 for projects lasting up to 18 months. TIMING RULES: decision lag is banded by request size, with GBP 1,000 to 20,000 decided within 10 weeks and GBP 20,000 to 100,000 within 14 weeks. The start date must be after the decision date, and the guidance recommends allowing a further 2 to 4 weeks for funding agreements and first payment. Critically for festivals, applicants are barred from starting activity, including advertising events or issuing calls for collaborators, before funding is confirmed, so a public programme should be planned to start roughly 12 to 18 weeks after submission. Only one application may be in assessment at any time. Non-UK organisations can be involved but cannot lead. Current Regularly Funded and Multi-Year Funded Organisations are excluded.
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.