Applications are opened on April 8, 2024. The deadline for part one is May 6, 2024.

Applications for part one should be submitted by May 6th at 11:59pm (EST).

The active research period will run from Fall 2024-Fall 2025. Complete drafts of the publication are expected in advance of the Symposium. Final editorial approvals will take place at the end of 2025 and publications are intended to be sent to the printer in early 2026.

Yes, you must be nominated to apply. Once nominated, you’ll be sent a link to part one of the application.

This fellowship is for North American (US, Canada, and Mexico-based) artists and writers. The fellowship will be conducted in English.

You must be invited to nominate a candidate. To nominate, please fill out the submission form linked in your invite email.

UnionDocs has done work to reach out to a diverse group of nominators working across disciplines in order to form a competitive and exciting pool of applicants. Please only nominate someone if you have been invited.

In part one of the application, we are inviting writers and documentary filmmakers to apply as individuals. UnionDocs will lead a matchmaking process that will pair-up selected writers and filmmakers, who will then be invited to develop a shared research proposal for part two of the application.

After you have been nominated and received an invitation to apply, please fill out part one of the application which is very brief. Artists will be asked to submit their biography, artist statement, links to work samples, and a few other details. Writers will be asked to submit their biography, pdfs of writing samples, and answer a few general questions.

Your application will be reviewed by the selection panel. If you are selected for part two of the application process, you will take part in a brief matchmaking process led by UnionDocs that will pair-up selected writers and filmmakers. Once paired up, you will be invited to submit part two of the application. This includes developing a motivating question and shared research proposal. The writer applicant is ultimately responsible for submitting part two in consultation with the filmmaker applicant.

Writers in the second round will have one week to review the work of artists in the second round. They will then submit a ranking by preference of who they would like to work with. Artists will also be consulted to confirm their preferences and acceptance of the partnership in this process. Once paired, the artist and writer will have two weeks to develop a short proposal for part two of the application.

For the second stage of the application process, you will elaborate on a central question that will motivate the exchange, research, and writing and editing that is central to the fellowship.

The team at UnionDocs, Collection Editor Rachel Valinsky, and representatives from the curatorial teams for our partners.

You can nominate a desired collaborator and if you both are invited to submit a proposal, it is possible to pair up. 

This fellowship is geared toward filmmakers with substantive portfolios demonstrating significant formal experimentation, and writers with established research skills and exemplary published work. If you are still in an earlier phase of artistic development, we encourage you to check out other UNDO Workshops and Labs for growth opportunities.

No. Writers from disciplines beyond film studies or film criticism are strongly encouraged to apply.

We are not looking for scriptwriters. The fellowship is focused on developing critical discourse; sharing research, ideas, and references; authoring an original work for publication, and editing a small volume of essays on the research question.

No, but you must be able to attend the in-person commitments. Travel and lodging will be provided. 

Air Travel or more convenient equivalents and Lodging will be provided for all in-person commitments, listed below:

October – 2024 – Public Seminar at DocLisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

October 2025 – Public Symposium with presentations, screenings and panel discussions at EMPAC, Troy, NY.

Writing a series of informal entries, at least once each month, taking the form of an open exchange between the artist-writer pairs in an online space that documents the ongoing dialogue and sharing progress around the proposed question.

Regular video meetings geared toward logistical planning for the engagements, developing the publication, and work-in-progress session requested by the artists (limited to 1 per fellow).

The fellowship will be granted to eight participants in total, consisting of four writer-filmmaker pairs.

Each fellow will receive $20,000 for their participation in the year-long program. Funding comes with a few basic requirements, but is otherwise unrestricted for the artists. Funding for the writer is a $15,000 commission, plus a discretionary budget of $5000 for the commissioning components of the publication.

Funding will be distributed in a series of installments over the course of the fellowship period as the commitments are fulfilled.

We are only able to accommodate travel for 2 participants per pair, and recommend limiting the collaboration to those who are able to take part in all aspects of the program. This does not mean the work produced with these funds needs to be produced alone.

Yes.

Saturated in images and information, audiences are increasingly distrustful of inherited ways of picturing the world and have become more sophisticated in reading media. Narratives that are too transparent in their purpose are easily discounted as biased, and the power relations that are always part of image-making are routinely called out as inequitable. Values have evolved beyond simple representations of our complex times. New voices, new attitudes, and new approaches in documentary making have the potential to bring together, galvanize, and creatively challenge those who imagine a more progressive vision of society. Like the poet, the documentary artist’s task is to create new languages and new possibilities of representation in film in order to express the unrecorded lives of communities for whom existing forms of filmmaking are inadequate. They have to invent a new grammar to transform the historical legacy of inequality into the possibility of a creative practice. We cannot, however, expect such powerful aesthetic innovations to develop exclusively from the labor of the artist in solitude. Engendering such work requires support—in the practical resources that allow for deep and sustained creative explorations, in bringing together communities to discuss and celebrate this work, as well as through considerable efforts to understand, interpret, and contextualize these new and nascent practices.

To encourage experimentation in practice and form, each pair will foreground a central “motivating question” to be researched and explored over the fellowship period. In tandem with a review of the artist’s portfolio and the writer’s published work, the selection panel will consider the merit of this question and its relevance to contemporary struggles within movements for social change. This criteria necessarily concentrates attention on a pool of artists who not only seek groundbreaking formal invention in their work, but are also acutely concerned with how their work affects society and enters the political landscape.

The impact of formally adventurous, artful documentaries on social change and equality has not been appropriately studied and articulated. Artistic work often circulates in smaller audiences through a slow, long period of distribution; offers experiences, ideas, and narratives that are not easily summarized; and can be directly critical of the manipulations present in advocacy film. While hard to capture with quantitative metrics, the power of this work should not be underestimated: it raises important personal and social questions; pushes audiences beyond comfortable worldviews; creates new languages that offer alternate angles of communication on the persistent causes and manifold effects of inequality; and creates shared aesthetic experiences and emotional points of reference that can generate empathy and strengthen connections in communities of activism. Still, chronicling and understanding these operations in the world are not simple tasks. They must be the subject of research and writing.

While there are many talented authors, cultural critics, and academics working in the field today, their research and writing is ordinarily in response to artistic final products. Thus the influence of their ideas and interpretation is retrospective and their knowledge of the artistic process can be limited. Rarely are they able to engage in the creative practice and thinking from which new forms of documentary film emerge. This exposure would seem to be a significant reciprocal benefit. Likewise, the effort of the researcher and writer is rarely directed toward a specific artist, instead they are primarily in service of a select readership or community engaged in a specialized discipline. The hope is that the deep intellectual engagement that comes out of this initiative will offer the artist-fellow validation in the art community, a recognition of their past creative achievements, a strong vote of confidence in their ability to continue to produce meaningful work, as well as a new set of provocations and possibilities.

While we have many talented authors, cultural critics and academics working in the field today, their research and writing is ordinarily in response to artistic final products. Thus the influence of their ideas and interpretation is retrospective and their knowledge of the artistic process can be limited. Rarely are they able to engage in the creative practice and thinking from which new forms of documentary film emerge. This exposure would seem to be a significant reciprocal benefit. Likewise, the effort of the researcher and writer is rarely directed towards a specific artist, instead they are primarily in service of a select readership or community engaged in a specialized discipline. The hope is that the deep intellectual engagement that comes out of this initiative will offer the artist fellow validation in the art community, a recognition of their past creative achievements, a strong vote of confidence in their ability to continue to produce meaningful work, as well as a new set of provocations and possibilities.