AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship

Viet Voices is excited to announce an open call for California’s first national AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship: Cycle 3, an opportunity for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) artists to engage with the art community and develop their professional practice from March to August 2026.

What is real when algorithmic economies continuously shape how we consume, feel, police, and desire? As artificial intelligence accelerates into a new industrial era, we wonder how our consciousness continues to expand and fragment through the cyber body.

Drawing from Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”, we call upon artists who understand the erotic as a primordial essence — an embodied intelligence capable of disrupting systems that sever feeling from knowledge. How does technology and vitality interplay? What processes might balance our modern yet earthly existence?

Across internet ecologies and screen based culture, the human condition is increasingly trained for habitual dopamine rewards. Underneath lays older contracts: karmic cycles of debt and reap, intergenerational trauma, (para)social attachements, and ancestral duty. Karma is a lived practice, where our agreements in labor, relationships, and the body reach reconciliation.

We ask artists across all disciplines (especially in new media, social practice, performance, and installation): How does karma and the erotic challenge your work? What reaches activation, interruption, or completion in 2026?

Key themes include:

Karma (familial, financial, colonial, digital, ecological)

Erotic power and agency

Diasporic spirituality, ritual, and otherness

The body as archive and site of consequence

Technology, algorithms, machine & animal

We invite practices that treat art-making as transformative, reclaiming pleasure, grief, and intuition as ways of knowing; and that resists extraction through presence, community, and refusal.

About the Fellowship: The AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship is an artist-led program designed to support early-career AAPI artists and cultural workers who are at a pivotal stage in their artistic journey. The fellowship provides a nest for the development and presentation of new work while offering professional/personal development workshops alongside AAPI kin. We invite fellows to question what gathering looks like in cyberspace, and how to ritualize our (re/un)learning processes while in community. We seek contemporary artists who conceptualize beyond the commercial, and use art making as a pathway towards communal care. We commit to challenge censorship to experiment with the multiplicity of being.

Benefits of the Fellowship:

Exhibition Opportunity: Showcase your work in a group exhibition in San Diego-Tijuana Border Lands with support in developing and documenting your work.

Mentorship: Ongoing mentorship from AAPI artists and arts professionals, including monthly, one-on-one studio visits, and co-hort salon-style presentations.

Professional Development: Opportunities to participate in workshops/ceremonies, artist talks, and networking events with fellow artists, curators, and art professionals.

Financial Support: A stipend to support the production of new work, materials, transportation, and/or living expenses for the fellowship period. Each fellow will receive a honorarium of $4,000 disbursed monthly alongside a $500 production stipend.

Community Engagement: Connect with a network of diasporic artists and art spaces, queering the boundaries and intersections of art in Kumeyaay Land.

Requirements

18 years of age or older from any city.

Emerging and early career artists of Asian American, Pacific Islander, and/or Native Hawaiian descent. LGBTQ2S+ identifying folks are strongly encouraged to apply. Artists that are in the early stages of their creative development, not more than 10 years of generative experience (not including any exhibition opportunities provided through a school or college program).

Open to visual art mediums, including but not limited to installation, performance, new media (sound/video/technology), painting, sculpture, photography, and inter/anti-disciplinary work. The fellowship is not intended for commercial artists, musicians, theatre artists, or others whose work is generally not presented in a visual art context.

Fellows are required to attend all monthly scheduled Fellowship development sessions and a weeklong exhibition process in San Diego, CA.

Not participating in a comparable development, fellowship, or residency program at the time of the program.

Committed to addressing issues of diaspora, gender, sexuality, environment, social health, and/or social justice through their artistic practice.

Not a student or enrolled in any degree seeking program at the time of the program .

Not currently a member, employee, board memberof Viet Voices.

Application Instructions

To apply for the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship, please submit the following materials online.

• Artist Statement (max 500 words): Describe your artistic practice, your goals for the fellowship, and why you are applying.
• Portfolio: A selection of 5 images or video clips of recent work. Please name each file “firstname-lastname-title-year”. Performance video URL(s) can be sent through a a PDF (Youtube and Vimeo preferred with required passwords). Porfolio PDFs are welcome
• Artist CV
• Proposed Project (max 1000 words): Narrate the specific project you plan to develop during the fellowship and how it aligns to socially engaging audiences and the open call.

Submission Deadline: March 1st, 2026 11:59 PST