June 2025
The arts dividend, what happened in 2005 Nigeria, come think with me in a quiet flat
Hi, Immaculata here.
Hope you’re doing well. This newsletter is now culturepays.substack.com because I want as much of what I do here to be a walking billboard: Culture Pays. The old link studiostyles.substack.com redirects here.
After over a year of having Deborah Iyalagha assist me with the Opportunities newsletters, I decided to go solo again. Resources (mainly, energy to supervise another person’s work) have dwindled. After IG deleted my Studio Styles account weeks ago, it also recently deleted the new #CulturePays account I made. I took that as a sign to invest my time and energy in other ways I’ve been turning towards: even slower, deeper, longer, quieter work.
So, 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. Consider it a kind of course—#CulturePays: theory and practicals.
Opportunities
Across artistic research and production, publishing, journalism and documentary, academic research, and literary writing. & OPEN TO AFRICANS LIVING ON THE CONTINENT.
Please visit the source for official information.
Art
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.
Magazine Open Call, HAPAX (11 June 2025)
HAPAX Magazine is a print publication which showcases only newly created ideas on its pages and doesn’t share them online. It commissions artists and curators working with photography to make new work for the magazine that appears only on its pages and isn’t shared online. Think of it as a glitch space for experimenting with a departure from your usual practice. £500 for each commission.
Obodo Artist Fund, Obodo Nigeria (15 June 2025)
OAF focuses on uplifting the work of women, queer, and allied artists whose practices explore African decolonial knowledge systems, indigenous narratives, and alternative historiographies.
This year’s theme is Borders and Bodies, evoking not just physical demarcations—nations, territories, and migration—but also ideological, historical, and cultural boundaries that shape who is seen, heard, and remembered.
The website has the deadline as 30 May, but their 1 June newsletter says the deadline is 15 June 2025.
Publishing
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.
Journalism and Documentary
The IDA Documentary Award (15 June/July 2025)
The Bayeux Calvados-Normandy award for war correspondents (5 June 2025)
The SFFILM Documentary Film Fund (23 June /7 July 2025)
The IDFA Bertha Fund for creative documentaries (10 June 2025)
The Sir Harry Evans Global Fellowship, in partnership with Durham University and Reuters, provides a nine-month fellowship for an early-career journalist to undertake an investigative project. (18 June 2025)
Women Photograph $5,000 grants (15 June 2025) and mentorships with $2,000 (6 June 2025) for visual journalists working on documentary projects.
Academic Research
Postdoctoral Research Associate positions, The African Poetry Book Fund at Brown University (23 June 2025)
The researchers will work on the African Poetry Digital Portal Project, led by Kwame Dawes and Lorna Dawes, which documents the work of African poets and provides equitable digital access to the related creative and intellectual artifacts, materials, and research on African Poetry that is housed in academic and cultural institutions in Africa and its diaspora. They will also have teaching responsibilities.
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
Check out these two sources:
The Commonwealth Foundation’s curated opportunities list, which currently includes calls from the likes of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize (15 June 2025) and Writing Space Africa (30 June 2025).
Esohe Iyare’s weekly newsletters at African Writer Weekly. May 14 issue and May 21 issue.
Resource
The National Library of Nigeria’s digital repository
The repository has a lot of juicy stuff from the 1950s to date: speeches, books, journals and magazines. I haven’t gotten into it fully, but it’s looking promising.
Recs
Black Orpheus Dispatch: The Creative Economy Paradox (22-minute essay by Shalom Kasim, in Olongo Africa)
Shalom Kasim, the Jos-based Managing Editor of Mud Season Review, is one of the fellows on both Archivi.ng’s inaugural research fellowship and the Black Orpheus Exploration Project. Since February, he has been sharing monthly essays on his thoughts and findings as he explores the cultural and intellectual significance of Black Orpheus magazine (1957-1975) as a platform that bridged diverse African voices and shaped the continent’s literary identity.
In the linked essay, he argues that, “if we are serious about building a future that is full of imagination and meaning, then we have to stop treating creative projects like side hustles or nice-to-haves.”
The Arts Dividend: Why Investment in Culture Pays, revised edition. (book by Darren Henley, Chief Executive at Arts Council England)
Whereas in the essay above, Kasim focuses on creativity and the creative ecosystem, in The Arts Dividend, Darren Henley talks about funding culture as well and what funding creativity and culture changes beyond the ecosystem of stories. He argues that public investment in artists, arts organisations, museums and libraries changes places, economies, narratives, aspirations, and lives.
As the Chief Executive of the Arts Council England, his focus is on public investment, which I love because culture is our matter. Of course, England is not an African country, and its economy has different challenges, but I believe in public investment in culture, any and everywhere.
2005 Nigeria, Through the Eyes of Nairaland (19-minute essay by Kunle Adebajo, in The Archivist)
Reading this essay was a joy, a pleasure… in how it returned texture to a time in my memory that grief had levelled to a simple story of two plane crashes.
A lot happened in 2005, including that 22-year-old Seun Osewa founded Nairaland, a digital public for Nigerians, home and abroad. This was before Facebook, before Twitter. The essay is well-written, so well done that it takes me immediately to the heart of the matter, the shape, sound, temperature, rhythm of that time—a very special time for Nigeria. Hope was breaking through the soil after decades of military brutalisation.
Everybody say- thank you, Kunle, and to the entire team that made the essay possible.
Art Illustrator/Director: Owolawi Kehinde
Encounters: South African International Documentary Festival, Cape Town and Johannesburg (19–29 June, 2025)
Running since 1999, this stellar festival is back again with A LOT of good stuff! Visit this link for a summary press release of this year’s show list, and this link for industry events.
My Invitation
In this next season of my work life, I’m aiming to do less concluding, less judging/appraising and more making with, thinking with, feeling with and being with. For instance, I’d like to build a library and host exploratory spaces (book clubs, residencies, etc) rather than write another essay. I don’t think one is better or more necessary than the other; I enjoy encountering people’s conclusions and appraisals of things (give me a pov! a backbone!), but I’m just not doing as much touching of other people’s ‘how does it feel’ as I would like to.
So, if you’re interested in spending a 10-14 day residency at my flat in Enugu, let me know.
This is for anyone who would like to spend those days engaging deeply with something in their work or life, and something in mine. Maybe you have an essay film draft you need to workshop (I do!), or you’d like to experiment with new ways of using iru/ogiri, or maybe you’re heartbroken from losing an opportunity you thought was the one and you’d like a brief change of environment and the silence and sounding board to ask questions, or you’re starting an art project and would like to consult some of the New Culture Studios magazines from 1978-1979.
At the end, we make something that lives on as a momento. A painted stone, a print zine we bind ourselves, a podcast episode, a soundscape collection, a painting, who knows?
I have a modest collection of around 200 books that have survived multiple ruthless selection processes over 10 years of moving across over 15 homes. The collection covers African radicalism, interiorities and histories, food, spirituality and mythology, science-backed wellness, Nigerian law, grief, flowers, Biafra, and more. There’s a balanced amount of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, academic books, cookbooks, magazines and photo books. But more than this, from my 10 years as a student/journalist/researcher, I’ve gotten good at figuring out how to find information, and I’d love to use that skill in service of your residency subject. Also, Enugu is interesting and beautiful, and I can introduce you to a few people here.
The flat is in a quiet family-houses part of town, has one good bed, a decent kitchen, a living room, a dining/workspace and a balcony. Different kinds of incense and scent diffusers. Light is okay. Fans in all rooms except the kitchen and an AC in the bedroom, but like if the bill passes 20k, abeg you’ll cover the difference.
You cover your travel and transportation, I handle your accommodation, stock the pantry and make us one meal each or every other day. I’ll sleep somewhere else while you’re here.
Please consider this a personal invitation. I’m not an organisation or an institution. I’m repurposing the money I would have used to pay for assistance on the newsletter. There’s no insurance on either side. Just one girl on the internet asking you to come to her house. To protect myself, I’ll prioritise responses from people in my extended network, but I’d love to hear from anyone sincerely interested, anyone with a lot to give and willing to receive just as much.
What’s in it for me? The part of me I enjoy the most is the part that loves to get into a thing with another person or two, raise it to the light, poke and prod it ad nauseam, really get into it. And it’s the part of me that gets the least airtime. She’s an instrument, and I’m trying to find good use of her. This is an experiment, and if it works out, it’s gonna grow into one ludicrously capacious bag.
I’m at hello@studiostyles.org if you wanna start a conversation.
