cavendish arts science fellowship
Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship 2026-27
International open call for artists
Cavendish Arts Science, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Applications are now open for the Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship 2026-27.
Application deadline: Saturday 16 May 2026, 11am British Summer Time (GMT+1)
This unique collaborative opportunity is open to artists internationally and is not confined to any single aesthetic, theme or medium. Artists with no previous experience of working with scientists or in a scientific environment are particularly encouraged to apply.
The Fellowship offers opportunities for playful experimentation and the space to re-imagine beyond conventional artistic and scientific boundaries. It is conceived as a transformative artistic fellowship, designed for artists to explore new approaches and ways of thinking through engagement with scientists and beyond, and to use these explorations as a springboard for experimenting with and developing new artistic work.
Cavendish Arts Science seeks adventurous artists:
whose practice resonates with its ethos of experimenting, decentring and re-imagining
who can demonstrate high quality artistic ideas, processes and outcomes
whose approach to making work is playful, who are open to new ideas and to experimenting with new approaches to their practice
who work with communities that are not privileged in the mainstream and who explore alternative ways of knowing the world
The Fellowship is delivered through a partnership between Cavendish Arts Science, an initiative of the Cavendish Laboratory for Physics and Girton College, University of Cambridge, thanks to the vision and support of Una Ryan.
It will run for one year from October 2026 to October 2027, with a residency period in Cambridge typically of at least six months up to one year.
It is financially supported:
£10,000 GBP stipend paid to the artist towards living costs and expenses
Rent-free accommodation and meals provided at Girton College during the residency period in Cambridge
Travel budget of up to £3,000 GBP (depending on where the artist is based) will be made available to support the cost of travel to/from Cambridge
Production budget of £10,000 GBP will be made available to support the development of new work arising from the Fellowship.
Previous Fellows include:
Multi-disciplinary artist Akeelah Bertram (2024-5) who brought her interest in exploring spirituality, collective narratives and immersive technologies to her conversations with physicists.
Artist, dancer and researcher Robert Ssempijja (2023-4) who brought decolonial questions and an interest in our capacity to re-imagine how we live with uncertainty.
Artist, composer and DJ Ain Bailey (2022-3) who brought an interest in multi-channel sound, architectural acoustics and the constellation of sounds that form individual and community identities.
Experimental filmmaker Logan Ryland Dandridge (2021-2) who brought his interests in memory, non-linear time, and Black experience to his encounters with physicists.
Thulani Rachia is the current CAS Fellow.
Selected from over 700 artists worldwide who responded to the previous Open Call, Thulani has been in residence in Cambridge since October 2025, exchanging ideas with physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory, and Fellows working across multiple disciplines at Girton College.
Thulani is a South African artist working across moving image, performance, music composition, and sculpture**.** His broader inquiry, rooted in his research-based practice Siwaguba kanjani amaphupho ethu agqitjwe kulezindonga? (in his mother tongue isiZulu, 'How do we excavate the dreams laid to rest in these walls?'), centres on two key processes in his work: critique and recovery — seeking a collective reclamation from the cultural erasure and displacement wrought by colonial ethnocide. His work has been exhibited at institutions and festivals both nationally and internationally including São Paulo-Arte; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Subsolo Laboratorio de Art São Paulo; Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art and Edinburgh Art Festival.
"I'm grateful for the ways my conversations and encounters within the CAS community have inspired unexpected shifts in my practice, revealing new ways of seeing and working." – Thulani Rachia, CAS Fellow 2025/6
For more information and to apply: https://www.cavendish-artscience.org.uk/open-call/
About Cavendish Arts Science
Cavendish Arts Science creates collective encounters between art and science that explore the world, our humanity, and our place in the world. Rooted in an ethos of experimenting, decentring and re-imagining, the programme supports artistic work that questions traditional centring of voices and ways of knowing, and creates new spaces to re-imagine material and immaterial universes.
About the Cavendish Laboratory
The Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge has an extraordinary history of discovery and innovation in Physics since its opening in 1874. Research in the Cavendish has been instrumental in our understanding of the physical world. Fundamental questions addressed by research in the laboratory today range from understanding space and the universe, to exploring time, matter and energy in all its forms and at every scale, from the very large to the inconceivably small. The Cavendish Laboratory moved to its new state-of-the-art home, the Ray Dolby Centre, in 2025.