Mentorship Residency Program

The Indigo Arts Alliance studio located in Portland, Maine is the host site for our Mentorship Artists Residency program. This program is the heart of IAA, modeling our values of global community building. Our goal is to bring together artists from diverse backgrounds of the African Diaspora to engage in their creative process, while building lasting relationships rooted in co-mentorship. We believe artists hold the key in creating a better world, and in our work, we allow for Black and Brown voices to lead the way.

The Mentorship Residency Program is a pioneering residency concept that serves as an arts incubator with generous workspace and modern facilities enabling the creative work of visual artists across disciplines. We foster mentorship by pairing two artists together during a residency period to cultivate rich conversation, collaboration, and exchange experiences, knowledge, art industry information and technical skills. The artist-pairing consists of a National or International artist who is traveling to the state of Maine from their respective homes to be in residence with a Local/Regional artist. The goal of the pairing is to build positive relationships that enhance the individual artists as human beings and thought leaders. We want to create healthy relationships for artists of color who are navigating their art practice and create avenues of success that build networks.

Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Black Futures Artist in Residence Program is open to diverse voices, emerging and established, called to express the Black experience through an arts practice that inspires dialogue and builds community. Our goal is to support Black performing artists at all points of their process and to give them an opportunity to conduct in depth research without the pressure of presenting a completed work by the end of the residency.



Black Futures is proudly funded by the City of San Francisco’s Dream Keeper Initiative and administered by the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

Individuals and collaborative teams selected for the Black Futures residency program will receive:

• A $6,000 stipend which can be used how the resident sees fit.
• $2,500 to support the production of your work during the residency or to host an in-person engagement event for the Bayview community (eg, work-in-progress presentation, artist Q&A with talkback).
• Up to 100 hours of free rehearsal space at Zaccho Studio in San Francisco.
• A $1,000 stipend to a mentor of your choice to support you during your residency.
• Social media and marketing support.
• Additional professional development workshops to assist you with the creation of your required community engagement event, budgeting, grant writing, and brand asset creation.
• Additional resident gatherings geared towards sharing artistic practice, ideas around collaboration, and holistic approaches to well-being.

Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation is a Nigerian non-profit founded in 2019 by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA and an esteemed board of Directors. It delivers residency and public programmes across two sites located in Lagos and Ijebu. The multi-use live/work spaces host multidisciplinary artists, researchers and curators from all over the world in awarded residencies for up to three months.

In Lagos, the Foundation is hosted in an award-winning building designed by Elsie Owusu in collaboration with Nihinlola Shonibare. The secondary location designed by Papa Omotayo sits on a 54-acre working farm owned by Shonibare located on the outskirts of Ikise, a village neighbouring Ijebu-Ode. The farm produces crops ranging from yams and cassava to peppers and cashew.

The Foundation’s mission is underpinned by an ethos that strives to create a platform for creative and career development and knowledge exchange. Through the support of international partnerships, G.A.S. hopes to break down traditional barriers of privilege, wealth and lack of infrastructure and provide opportunities for both its residents and the local community.

In 2022, G.A.S. began populating its library archive after receiving a donation from Professor John Picton and Sue Picton of a lifelong personal library collection, consisting of around 1500 volumes. The donated books cover topics including Sub-Saharan African art, history, and archaeology, as well as African American and Black British arts. 

KODA offers an artist residency program for two mid-career, female-identifying and/or non-binary artists who create conceptual and socially engaged work. The Fall 2025 residency will span from August 1-October 31, 2025. The program is placed under the theme of Peace-Building.

Selected artists receive:

• Studio space from August 1-October 31, 2025 on Governors Island
• Optional residency exhibition on Governors Island
• Honorarium in the amount of $1,000
• Studio visits with art world professionals such as curators and art historians
• Public engagement opportunities, with an additional honorarium of $250
• Professional development credit of $200
• Monthly curatorial and production consultancy with KODA team
• Networking and collaboration opportunities
• Access to Materials for the Arts

APPLY: The Open Call for KODA Fall 2025 Social Practice Residency program placed under the theme of Peace-Building opens on March 10, 2025. Proposals will be accepted between March 10, 2025 at 10:00 AM ET and April 10, 2025 at 11:59 PM ET. Two selected artists will be notified of the residency offer by May 31, 2025.

BOOM Concepts is a creative hub dedicated to the advancement of Black, Brown, Queer and Femme artists. BOOM Concepts is located in Pittsburgh and since 2014 has curated 50 exhibitions on-site, paid out over $100k in artists fees and produced 200+ events across the country. BOOM Concepts serves as a space for field building, knowledge sharing, mentorship, and storytelling. In its 8th soon to be 9th year, BOOM Concepts continues to work with creatives to find innovative strategies around entrepreneurship and artistic practice. In 2021, BOOM Concepts was selected to represent Pittsburgh for the Google Arts & Culture platform and was identified as an American Cultural Treasure through The Heinz Endowments and The Ford Foundation.

The BOOM Universe Residency at Alloy Studios is an in-house program that hosts multiple visiting artists quarterly. BOOM Concepts supports visiting artists in a multitude of ways including housing (the space includes full kitchen, bathroom, studio/practice area, and an area for rest), creative practice support, an opportunity to participate in BOOM programming, connecting visitors with Pittsburgh’s art ecosystem, along with allowing for space for rest from their busy careers. BOOM’s main support is focused on the advancement of Black, brown, femme and queer artists, and creative entrepreneurs understanding the need for such experiences that are vital to ones career growth. 

We hope after artists undergo their time with BOOM Concepts they feel the