Residencies and Fellowships Info + Application

2025 Program Focus: A Radio Art Hour

Applications Due: February 1, 2025

Wave Farm welcomes submissions from artists, researchers, tinkerers, and writers, from a variety of disciplines who will embrace this opportunity to create work for a terrestrial radio station that celebrates risk-taking work and prioritizes the uniquely urgent and intimate nature of the radio medium. Applicants should deeply consider the distinctive qualities of FM radio as opposed to online radio and/or podcasts. This is an opportunity open to international applicants. Women, gender non-conforming people, and people of color are encouraged to apply.

Artists-in-residence will spend 10-days on-site at Wave Farm (Acra, NY) developing a new 55-minute radio artwork designed explicitly for terrestrial radio broadcast on Wave Farm’s creative community radio station WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears. Their radio artwork will also be included in Wave Farm’s weekly syndicated program The Radio Art Hour, which is rebroadcast on dozens of additional radio stations across the U.S. A stipend of $1,000 will be provided to each resident artist. In 2025, residencies will be offered monthly, May through October.

Radio Art Fellows will dedicate a month-long remote engagement researching and selecting radio artworks by historical and contemporary artists to comprise an episode of the The Radio Art Hour. Fellowships will commence with a brief, in-person visit to Wave Farm, and are awarded in three categories: Research, Community Engagement, and Arts Writing. The Research Fellow will create an additional, second episode of The Radio Art Hour, the Community Engagement Fellow will conceptualize and conduct a public workshop, and the Arts Writing Fellow will produce writing informed by interviews with past Wave Farm Artists-in-residence about the Transmission Art genre for publication in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (University of California Press). Fellowship Mentors: Jay Needham, Neil Verma, and Gregory Whitehead will be available for consultation, leads, and feedback. A stipend of $2,000 will be provided to each fellow. In 2025, fellowships will be offered in April, November, December.

WGXC 90.7-FM Both Artists-in-residence and Radio Art Fellows will be featured on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears in NY’s Upper Hudson Valley, including a live interview about their work in general as well as their work at/with Wave Farm. Additional radio broadcast opportunities are also available upon request.

Wave Farm’s Outer Space: a Listening Gallery (opening spring 2025!)
In connection with the Residency and Fellowship Program in 2025, Artists-in-residence and Radio Art Fellows are invited to curate a selection of audio works by themselves and/or others to be installed in Outer Space for members of the public to experience during set open hours.

A definition of Transmission Art: Transmission art encompasses works in which the act of transmitting or receiving is not only significant, but the fulcrum for the artist’s intention. The genre involves a multiplicity of practices that often engage aural and visual broadcast media, where in some instances works for traditional broadcast are created, and at other times artists harness preexisting broadcast signals as source material manipulated in live performance, installation, and public interactive networks and tools. Similarly interested in the synaesthetic possibilities of radio, much of contemporary transmission art values interplay with waves, informed by historical and emergent wireless technologies. These works often challenge a conventional one-to-many definition of transmitter (or artist) and receiver (or audience) in ways that celebrate Brechtian aspirations for more multi-nodal wireless interactions. Wave Farm considers Radio Art a subsection of Transmission Art.

A definition of Radio Art: Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions, conceived of for transmission with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and this Radio Art Fellowship program.

Wave Farm Environment
Wave Farm is situated on 29 acres in the northern foothills of the Catskill Mountain Park. The property features meadows, two small ponds, and a pine forest with large walking paths.

Wave Farm’s Art Park is home to thirteen media art installations that reveal what is otherwise unheard or unseen. These stand-alone artworks are also instrumentation for visiting artists and experimenters. Electrical service, WiFi, and “line-in” RJ-45 jacks to the broadcast studio are installed every 250 feet, activating the considerable acreage as potential studio and performance space.

Social Atmosphere: Residents and Fellows should expect plenty of focused work time. Staff is available for questions during business hours, but often working remotely. Residents and Fellows should anticipate a rural setting in upstate New York, which is home to a growing number of artists and other creative economy workers. Note: While visitors to the area might see signs and symbols of pride and inclusivity, be aware that contrasting imagery supporting Trump, Blue Lives Matter, and the Confederacy are present in the local area.

Accommodations: Residents and Fellows are housed in the Wave Farm Study Center, which hosts one artist-in-residence or fellow at a time, or on occasion, more than one individual working as a collaborative duo or collective. Accommodations in the Study Center include two bedrooms (one full-sized bed each), studio workspace, kitchenette, lavatories up and downstairs, a shower, as well as the Study Center research library, WGXC 90.7-FM Acra broadcast studio, and Wave Farm offices. Please note: day visitors are welcome. Overnight guests (including family members) and pets are not permitted.

Transportation + Meals: Residents and Fellows must pay for their own travel expenses*, as well as expenses related to meals during their stay. Transportation is available from the Hudson Amtrak station, the Kingston bus station, or the Albany airport, as well as local transport for groceries and supplies. *Note, on a case-by-case basis, an advance of the artist fee or fellowship stipend will be made available to help offset travel expenses.

Rising Tide Award: Established in 2023 with the generous proceeds received from LoVid's Tide Predictor, an Art Blocks Curated series of onchain generative NFTs, an additional $1,500 will be awarded to a single resident. The Rising Tide Award aims to support an applicant with a multidimensional life and background, whose work is rooted in process, to further the pursuit of new ideas, experiments, and uncertainties. Artists with special circumstances that require additional funds such as: parents, artists from out of state/country, collaborators, and artists with non-traditional art/career experiences are encouraged to apply.

Eligibility: Wave Farm's Residency and Fellowship Program application is an international open call. Applicants should make a compelling argument in support of their proposed project, and either possess a significant body of past transmission-related work or demonstrate the aptitude and capacity to complete the proposed project. Full-time students are ineligible; however, exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis for career artists and writers who may have returned to school for post-graduate work. Past Wave Farm residents and fellows are eligible to apply.

Review + Notification Process: Applications will be evaluated in a peer review panel comprised of transmission artists, engineers, past residents and fellows, program mentors, and Wave Farm staff. Finalists will be contacted for Zoom interviews and final notifications will be made in late March.

Please note: artist fees and fellowship stipends will appear as “Other Income” on 1099s issued in conjunction with tax year 2025.

Application: A single application is used for both the Wave Farm Residency Program and the Radio Art Fellowship Program.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are DJ sets eligible?

No. We are looking for original content made explicitly for the medium of radio.

When are applications due?

Applications must be submitted no later than February 1, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. (ET) using the link above.

When will applicants be notified?

Notification will be made by March 31, 2025.

What criteria will the review panel use to make their selections?

A peer review panel will prioritize proposals that deeply consider the medium of radio, including the act of transmission and reception; projects that will accessible to a wide variety of audiences, because terrestrial radio reaches listeners of all kinds; and proposals that are both conceptually and technically feasible.

Wave Farm’s Radio Art Residency and Fellowship programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Greene County Legislature through the Greene County Cultural Fund.

Wave Farm Study Center Tour (2021)

Video by FusionLab.

Returning Residents Invitation

Once an artist participates in the Wave Farm Residency or Fellowship Program, schedules permitting, they are invited to return to Wave Farm for short-term overnight visits that include a broadcast on Standing Wave Radio and Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM. There is no cash artist fee available for these visits; however, overnight accommodation in the Study Center and transportation to and from the Hudson Amtrak station are provided. With advance permission, artists are welcome to bring a guest with them. This opportunity is available on a case-by-case basis, and artists are encouraged to make a request as far in advance as possible. To request a visit please email info@wavefarm.org.