UCL Creative Fellowships open for 2021 - Encounters with the Creative Humanities

The Creative Fellowships are designed to create time and space for practitioners from any areas of creative practice to engage with researchers and students at UCL, and after a successful pilot last year we are re-opening the programme to applicants.

The Creative Fellowships award

This year we are offering a grant of £5,000 to work on a project titled ‘Encounters with the Creative Humanities’.

Encounters aims to unpack creativity and the creative method, and to explore how creative practice operates as a form of knowing, exploring or discovering as well as doing, seeking to recognise the value of creative practice as knowledge creation and knowledge disruption. The Fellowship aims to allow a creative practitioner to explore, through their own practice, one or more of the following questions:

• How can creative practice connect with academic research to develop new ways of knowing?
• How can a creative, practice-based approach to the humanities help societies or communities create or disrupt the future?

The programme is broadly focused on the fields of performance, creative writing, visual arts or media, but we are open to receiving expressions of interest from practitioners from any creative field.

Our Fellows will be asked to respond creatively to the questions posed above and then plan and deliver at least two digital events aimed at staff or students at UCL. These could be seminars, creative workshops, performance events or any other medium that allows people to explore creativity collaboratively.

What we are looking for

We are looking for creative practitioners from any field who are interested in working within a university context for a period of time, to explore shared interests with researchers and students at UCL around the value of the ‘creative humanities’.

We are particularly interested in working with practitioners who may not have any prior experience of working with a university, and are committed to providing support to help the Fellow to navigate our university ‘walls’ and engage meaningfully with our communities.

I think the openness and willingness to get involved is key; taking part in IAS seminars was the thing that I found most daunting, but it was the biggest surprise to me, how beneficial that was. The close scrutiny and attention of fellow researchers to one's work, was/is challenging at first but ultimately a really special experience.  Nicola Baldwin, Playwright and UCL Creative Fellow 2019-20

Timeframe

Completed applications should be submitted by Friday 22 January 2021. You will be informed as to whether your proposal has been shortlisted by Friday 5 February, with short (online) interviews taking place the week commencing 8 February.

Fellowships would be expected to start from 1 March (or later by agreement), and must finish (including all payments made) by 31 July 2021.

Most of our community is currently still working remotely, but we hope to be able to return to some face-face interactions at some point during the first half of 2021, government regulations permitting.

To apply

Please complete and submit an Expression of Interest Form along with your CV and/or link to a digital portfolio/website, to the Creative Fellowships Project Manager by 5pm on Friday 22 January: Laura Mackenzie: l.mackenzie@ucl.ac.uk

Find out more about UCL Creative Fellowships:

• UCL Creative Fellowships 2021 - Programme Overview
• Launch of UCL Creative Fellowships – July 2019
• Recording of first draft reading of Wasteland, a new play by Nicola Baldwin