Chevening: Southeast Asian British Library Fellowship 2027–28
Overview
The Chevening Southeast Asian British Library Fellowship is a funded residency administered by Chevening, the UK government's international awards programme, and hosted by the British Library. It places one practitioner from Southeast Asia within the Library's research and collections environment for a sustained period. The British Library's holdings encompass manuscripts, sound recordings, maps, and ephemera across global cultures, offering a rare convergence of embodied practice and archival inquiry for dance and visual art practitioners. The fellowship supports a project that engages with the Library's collections, whether through choreographic research, visual art production, or interdisciplinary investigation. While the exact terms of the award—including stipend and travel—are not specified in the provided information, the residency is designed to facilitate deep, sustained inquiry. The host institution's scope and the fellowship's focus on archival engagement suggest an environment where research and creative production are mutually informing. This opportunity is not a studio residency in the conventional sense; it is a research-driven fellowship that expects the selected practitioner to work directly with primary source materials. The British Library's vast and varied collections—ranging from historical manuscripts to sound recordings—provide a rich substrate for projects that interrogate movement, memory, and cultural transmission. The fellowship's structure implies a period of immersion, allowing for rigorous exploration that may culminate in new work, a written component, or another form of documentation.