The Environmental Artist-in-Residence Program at Wildacres Retreat welcomes artists, scientists and other professionals engaging with ambitious ideas and who are activity-focused on current global environmental issues. Candidates will be chosen for their intellectual and creative rigor as well as activism in their creative practice, with a deep emphasis on our climate crisis and its many permutations for society moving forward.

The intent of the Wildacres EAIR program is to support professional individuals and their creative practices from several disciplines, including all areas of art, social practice, writing, research, environmental restoration, natural science and other environmental and creative disciplines.

Qualified applicants will include artists and scientists who focus on climate change, global warming, the extinction crisis, habitat loss, soil degradation, as well as remedies and human adaptations to these and other pressing climate crisis issues. We are interested in artists who understand the cycles of the natural elements they are investigating and how the dynamics of our warming planet play a role in those cycles. For instance, in the local Blue Ridge Mountains the demise of Hemlock forests through infestation by an introduced insect has unbalanced essential elements of local watersheds.