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.

If you ever dreamed of spending an extended period of time in Cuba simply making art, then this residency is ripe for your consideration. Run by CubaSeen and Santa Fe Workshops, this nine-day residency in Havana offers an immersive program that provides time and space to focus on your creative process inspired by the culture of the city’s thriving arts scene with structured direction and feedback from Cuba’s fine-art professionals.

This is a unique opportunity to travel to Cuba legally while enjoying constructive artistic feedback mixed with unstructured time to think, feel, and create art. The residency culminates with an exhibition at a gallery space in Old Havana.

This residency allows you the time to explore, reflect, and engage your natural curiosity as an artist with support and feedback from influencers in Havana’s sophisticated art community. Homebase is CALIS HAVANA, a boutique hostel in the leafy suburb of Vedado. This renovated 20th Century mansion includes comfortable guest rooms with shared common areas to meet, review work, and share meals.

In addition to accommodations and workspace, the residency offers structured critiques with Cuban artists and curators including Nelson Ramírez de Arellano, Director of the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center and Havana Art Biennial. Visits to galleries and artist’s studios further enrich the program’s outreach.

This residency complies with US Treasury Department General License requirements for legal travel to Cuba.

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.

https://wassaicproject.slideroom.com/#/permalink/program/83245

Application Opens: 3/24/25

Application Deadline: 6/2/25

Application Fee (USD): $25.00

*Please email Dani Klebes (danielle@wassaicproject.org) if you cannot afford to pay the application fee.

Applications are run through our Slideroom portal. 

About Us

The Wassaic Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, uses art and arts education to foster positive social change. We nurture connections between our artists and our neighbors facilitating a mutual broadening of perspectives and respect across economic and cultural boundaries.

Wassaic Project 2026 Residency Program Open Call 

The Wassaic Project accepts proposals for our 2026 Residency program, which includes the Winter Residency program (Jan – April 2026) and the Summer Residency program (June – September 2026). This call is for individual artists, collaborative teams, groups of two or more individual artists, and artists applying through our Family Residency program. The residency fee is $900 (the fee is per artist/collab group/artist team/family). The fees cover: semi-private studio space(s), private room in a shared house (our Family program receives a private house), access to our wood shop, print shop, and kiln, staff support, and programming such as our visiting artist program, artist talks, studio visits, open studios, artist presentations, etc.