2026 Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency
Interrupting Criminalization invites young artists (ages 16-24) directly impacted by criminalization, policing, or punishment, to apply for the 2026 Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency.
About the Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency
The Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency will award $2,500 grants to 14 artists to work on creative projects.
Re-launching after its inaugural year in 2022, the residency is named after Stevie Wilson, a Black, queer, incarcerated abolitionist writing, organizing, and building study groups and community in Pennsylvania. His work explores the meanings of identity, belonging, freedom, and community.
In 2022, 18 young artists from across the country were awarded residency grants. They painted, danced, sketched, wrote poems, took photographs, designed coloring books, worked with clay, fabric, film, and designed public sculptures and street art. They visited museums, created healing circles, sketched on riverbanks, and drew inspiration from new cities. Artists submitted their own project budgets and used the residency grants to cover expenses like monthly rent, groceries, transportation, cell phone bills, and art supplies. Read more about the residency in the 2022 report.
2026 Residency
The year’s residency is a program of Interrupting Criminalization, a movement resource hub offering information, cross-movement networks, learning, and practice for organizers, practitioners, and advocates on the cutting edge of efforts to build a world free of criminalization, policing, punishment, and violence.
Creative projects can take place between July to December, 2026. Completed applications are due by May 11, 2026 at 11:59 PM EST.
“I appreciate art for many reasons. Art can encourage dissent and we need more of that in our current moment. Art is important not just because it makes us think and feel differently (which is critical), but also because it helps to disrupt patterns and old ways of thinking. Artists have the power to ask, ‘Why can’t we do it this way?’ ‘Why don’t we try this?’ and ‘Why is that not possible?’ These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked now as we organize to defeat fascism.”
—Mariame Kaba in Prisons, Prose, and Protest
