July's Email (opportunities & recs)
what does a 13-year-old art career look like in Nigeria? working with AI in 2025?
Hello hello,
Happy new month!
In case you missed it, the Opportunities Roundup is now a monthly email where I share a few things for you to consider paying attention to: opportunities, ideas, conversations, events and the like. #CulturePays: theory and practicals.
Opportunities
Please visit the source for official information.
Cultural Organising
Initiation Fund, The German Federal Cultural Foundation (1 October 2025)
The Initiation Fund supports international research projects lasting up to nine and a half months, dedicated solely to exploring opportunities for collaboration (with German cultural organisations), becoming familiar with potential partners and ultimately initiating long-term partnerships.
The plan is to finance at least 60 initiation projects with up to 27,000 euros per project.
Eligible: Cultural institutions and independent artists' groups based in Germany or a non-European country, including Africa.
Not eligible: Organisations that focus exclusively on education, training and scientific research, as well as cultural (umbrella) associations, solo artists and researchers.
Research
Research Fellowship, WINGS Network (15 July 2025)
WINGS is a global network of philanthropy support and development organisations. They are looking for a short-term fellow to support research into our membership network to update our knowledge on the global philanthropy support ecosystem. This is a 2-3 day per week (16-24 hours) virtual, paid fellowship opportunity for an initial 3 months.
The Ireland Fellows Programme, Irish Aid (different deadlines)
The Ireland Fellows Programme enables early to mid-career professionals from eligible countries who are applying to commence a new programme at master’s level in Ireland no sooner than August 2026.
Bonn International Fellowship 2025, University of Bonn (22 September 2025)
The goal of this fellowship is to promote international academic cooperation by inviting excellent researchers (for short stays <12 days) from around the world to engage in collaborative research, scholarly exchange, and networking in Bonn. Applications can only be submitted by faculty or researchers from the University of Bonn who wish to host an international fellow. The invited fellows must be internationally recognised scholars from institutions outside Germany, with an outstanding track record in their respective fields.
Rahamon Bello Best PhD Thesis Award, The Institute of African and Diaspora Studies (IADS), University of Lagos. (30 September 2025)
This is a $1,000 (USD) award for the winner, $300 for the first runner-up and $200 for the second runner-up. The award seeks to encourage and appreciate early career scholars whose Ph.D. theses address African and diaspora issues and the reconfiguration of African Studies.
Art & Photography
RMB Latitudes CuratorLab 2025 (16 July 2025)
This is a call for ten aspiring curators who will be guided through a facilitated online residency, designed to offer practical experience in the industry and to hone their curatorial skills. For the fourth iteration of CuratorLab, we will be working with curators across the African continent, with South Africa being its main focus. No formal training is needed and practical curatorial experience is preferred. Mentorship and Curatorial programme will run online from 6 August - 15 October 2025.
Tender Visions fellowship, Tender Photos (15 July 2025)
Tender Visions is a cross-disciplinary commissioning program designed to support and elevate the work of photographers and writers based on the African continent. Each photographer will be paid a total sum of £1000 or its equivalent in local currency, and each writer £750 or its equivalent in local currency.
Still open from last email:
The Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize, Gallery 1957 (19 September 2025)
The Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize is a prize for Ghanaian women artists living either in Africa or across the diaspora. The first prize winner of the 2025 prize will be awarded a one-year artist residency and a solo exhibition at Gallery 1957, along with a cash prize of GHC 50,000. The first runner-up will be awarded GHC 30,000, while the second runner-up will receive GHC 20,000.
Publishing Grant 2025—2026, Sharjah Art Foundation (17 August 2025)
Sharjah Art Foundation invites cultural producers, including art and culture scholars, translators, writers, editors, independent publishers and publishing houses, collectives and non-profit institutions, to submit project proposals (up to 15,000 USD budget) that foreground an experimental approach to content and publishing, and challenge dominant and canonical knowledge systems.
Workshop, African Studies Journal (4 July 2025)
This is for early career scholars based in an African institution and passionate about just urban transitions in African cities. The year-long, funded international writing workshop is designed to elevate academic writing and publishing skills and consists of
an online event (Sept/Oct 2025) to co-organise and co-design the in-person workshop
a face-to-face writing workshop to be held in Cape Town, South Africa (Jan/Feb 2026) and
a final online symposium to present work (in May 2026).
The application form is here.
Literary Writing
Commissions at The Shuttle, National Association of Students and English and Literary Studies, UNILAG Chapter (1 July 2025)
The Shuttle is a student journal published by the Department of English, University of Lagos. For the next issue, commissions are being compensated for by the following.
The Nigerian food historian, anthropologist and author of Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria, Ozoz Sokoh (@kitchenbutterfly) is offering one undergraduate student writer 72,000 NGN to write an essay on the dialects of Nigerian food or Nigerian food history as it is captured in published texts.The filmmaker Omoregie Osakpolor is offering 30,000 NGN to any Nigerian undergraduate student writer willing to write about any aspect of Nigerian documentary film.
The publication Kryvent (@kryvent) and The Book Drive Bayelsa (@thebookdrivebayelsa) have teamed up to offer a stipend of 30,000 NGN to any Nigerian student writer willing to submit an essay on the language of non-profit communication and media and how it may enforce power imbalances and stereotypes.
Send your pitches to: tinyurl.com/commissionsattheshuttle.
For other literary opportunities, check out these two sources:
The Commonwealth Foundation’s curated opportunities list, which currently includes calls from the likes of the New Voices Poetry Contest (20 July 2025).
Esohe Iyare’s weekly newsletters at African Writer Weekly. June 18 issue and June 11 issue.
Reading Recs
AI is here, and while I truly don’t know if there’s anything we can do to slow its rise, it does look like it’s here to stay. And besides stand-alone chatbots, it’s embedded into way more everyday applications than we might readily recognise.
I want to acknowledge the issue of AI's escalating energy demands, even as it also offers potential to optimise energy use elsewhere. That energy is becoming a key domain of activity for Big Tech is thrilling to me (read: excited and yikes).
This would be the nth time humans have created something that helps solve the very problem it also exacerbates. Or solves one thing while generating a few others. And as with many such things, the question then becomes: How do we live/work well with this?
We're meeting the 1st gen of researchers and scientists who won’t know research without AI. If you’re a researcher or someone whose work regularly draws on research, and you’ve found yourself asking this same question, here are two recommendations that might come in handy:
ChatGPT in Scientific Research and Writing: A Beginner’s Guide by Jie Han, Wei Qiu and Eric Lichtfouse (2025, pdf)
This goes into the intellectual property rights, confidentiality, and privacy issues that can arise from the use of large language models on unpublished or copyright-protected content; compliance with their institutions’ policies and publishers’ guidelines; how chat helps with errors but also produces errors (especially hallucinatory ones!); how it helps with writing skill improvement because of how it also explains; its particular benefit for new-to-a-field researchers and the brainstorming stage of a project; and so much more.
International AI Safety Report (2025, pdf)
This is the first International AI Safety Report, and it was collaborated on by AI experts, AI-focused research institutes, and governments all around the world.
It brings together what experts all around the world know about three key questions are:
What can general-purpose AI do?
What are risks associated with general-purpose AI?
And what mitigation techniques are there against these risks?
An interview on making a living through art, 13 years in.
As part of the research for the 2025 Culture Pay Report, Kachi Eloka conducted interviews with four creatives and cultural practitioners. Here, I’m sharing one with a female artist who is 13 years into her career and currently based in Lagos.
It was incredibly valuable for me to understand the financial and broader economic realities of an artist who has spent over a decade navigating both the creative market and the Nigerian economy. In many other sectors, there’s often a clearer roadmap of what career progression looks like over time. But before this Culture Pay Survey, I struggled to imagine what could be said—with any degree of confidence—about what making a living in Nigeria’s creative sector might look like after ten years.
Of course, this single example doesn’t represent everyone. But it’s a node in a wider network offering, at the very least, some context.
If you would like to view the raw data of 388 responses we gathered, click here.
And for an interface that lets you explore the data by category (e.g. how many people below 30 outside Lagos are making more than 300k per month from their creative work?), click here.
