Call for Submissions: Interdisciplinary Residencies Program

Now, in 2025, they have hosted over 90 Interdisciplinary Residents, and they plan to award 40 Interdisciplinary Residencies annually. They hope their Residents will develop meaningful relationships around shared creative interests, and find abundant inspiration while at OSGF. This program supports varying Residents, needs, and strikes a balance of socialization, and independent work time.

Categories

• Artists and Writers
  • Individuals devoted to creative expression and innovative thinking that leads to new objects, movements, or ideas. This includes, but is not limited to, artists, dancers, filmmakers and musicians of all kinds, as well as writers of both fiction and non-fiction.
• Researchers & Scholars in the Humanities
  • Individuals devoted to traditional or non-traditional research and scholarship in anthropology, art history, history, human geography, history, language, law, politics, sociology and religion with connections to plants, gardens and landscapes.
• Conservation Scientists & Practitioners
  • Individuals undertaking research, practice, or action related to the conservation and sustainable use of plants, and the ecological/environmental systems of which they are a part of.
• Plant & Ecological Scientists
  • Individuals undertaking basic or applied research in plant science at the organismal or ecological level, including the importance of plants in ecological processes of all kinds.

Benefits

• The first week of the Residency will include required tours of the formal garden, landscape, and library. This orientation period is important to introducing Residents to their site, resources and staff.
• After this, Residents will be provided about 3 meals per week, and these are a very means of building community among Residents, OSGF staff, and other visitors who might be on-site.
• Residents are housed in nicely appointed shared accommodations. Each Resident will have a private bedroom and bathroom, and share a living space and kitchen with 1 – 3 other Residents.
• Visual artists will have 24/7 access to a studio within 0.75 miles of their accommodations, and other Residents will have a designated writing space in their accommodations.

Funding Information

• Residents selected for a 5-week session receive a $2,000 individual grant, and Residents selected for a 2-week session receive an $800 individual grant.

Costs Covered

• Residents will be asked to arrange transportation to Dulles International Airport or Union Station, and OSGF will provide ground transportation to their site in Upperville, VA.
• Residents who complete this program will be able to apply to their annual Perennial Residency Program.

Eligibility Criteria

• They recognize that individuals may be at different stages in their lives when they arrive at a point where a dedicated period in residency may would helpful to their work. There is no expectation that Residents be at a particular point in their career to apply for this program. They do, however, expect that Residents be considerate, able to live with a housemate who might be in a different stage than themselves, and Residents must be interested in interacting with the other members of their cohort, as well as other program participants who might be at OSGF.
• They do not allow pets or overnight visitors during the Residency. Residents must arrive on the first day of the program and depart on the last day of the program.

Selection Criteria

• Residents are carefully selected through a multi-round review process in which OSGF staff, Residency alumni, and external jurors review and score applications.
• Residents are ultimately selected by panels of external reviewers who are established and working in fields or practices relevant to OSGF’s mission. The primary criteria for scoring applicants include: an applicant’s current work’s relationship to the OSGF mission; potential of applicant; and quality of work samples.
• Due to the high volume of applications they receive, unfortunately they are not able to provide individualized feedback to applicants who are not selected for a Residency. In most cases, they do not allow selected Residents to defer their award.

Application Requirements

• For visual artists: 5 – 10 images, please include the dimensions, year, medium, and title of each work sample.
• For creative non-fiction, fiction, essayists, or other writers: 7 – 10 pages total that demonstrate your current interests. Please use 12-point font, 1-inch margins, and double-space your writing sample. Do not include photocopies of published work, title pages, tables of contents or hyperlinks.  Please be sure to state the genre of the work sample.
• For time-based artists, including: filmmakers, musicians, dancers, and performance artists: 10 minutes cumulatively of work samples. OSGF encourages video files to be uploaded directly to Submittable, but when necessary, they also accept links to video or other external sites as long as the appropriate passwords are provided.
• For poets and playwrights: you may submit 7 – 10 pages total.  Poetry may be spaced as needed, and scripts should follow standard script formatting.

For more information, visit OSGF.