Regional Curatorial Fellowship
Opportunity: Regional Curatorial Fellowship
Organisation: This is Gender
Location: International / remote
Contract: Part-time, flexible fellowship
Duration: Seven months
Start date: October 2026
Stipend: Up to £3,000
Open to: Early-career curators and cultural practitioners from global majority countries and historically underrepresented communities
Application deadline: 22 September 2026
About the fellowship
This is Gender has launched its inaugural Regional Curatorial Fellows Programme for early-career curators and cultural practitioners working across photography, visual culture, and gender justice.
The programme will embed regional curators within This is Gender’s international photography competition. Fellows will contribute local knowledge, critical perspectives, and lived contexts to the ways photographic work is discovered, selected, interpreted, contextualised, and shared.
The fellowship aims to support a new generation of curators while contributing to a platform that is more regionally rooted, critically informed, and connected to the communities represented through its work.
About This is Gender
Across six competition cycles, This is Gender has developed into an international platform for photography, visual storytelling, and public dialogue.
It has received thousands of submissions from artists and practitioners worldwide and presented photographic work through exhibitions, publications, major media platforms, research, advocacy, and policy contexts.
The Regional Curatorial Fellows Programme forms part of its commitment to challenging outdated, extractive, and colonial approaches to representing gender by broadening who selects, contextualises, commissions, and circulates images.
Fellowship activities
As part of an international cohort, fellows will:
- Work within a global photography competition receiving thousands of submissions
- Gain experience in how international platforms discover, review, and support photographic work
- Contribute regional knowledge and cultural insight to curatorial selection and interpretation
- Participate in the development of exhibitions, editorial outputs, digital storytelling, and other public-facing projects
- Develop their curatorial writing, framing, and critical voice
- Engage with international judges, artists, curators, editors, and cultural practitioners
- Build relationships with a global network of peers and professionals
Who should apply?
Applications are welcomed from:
- Curators
- Critics and writers
- Researchers
- Artistic directors
- Photographers
- Organisers
- Cultural practitioners
Applicants should come from global majority countries or historically underrepresented communities, including those across Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Oceania, and diasporic communities worldwide.
Early-career practitioners and recent graduates are particularly encouraged to apply. Applicants do not need to hold a formal curatorial job title.