The application for the Jan van Eyck Academie alumni residency in Maastricht is open 1 March – 1 April 2026. The residency period lasts 11 months and will take place from 15 January to 15 December 2027.
The residency designed for alumni of the Academy of Fine Arts supports the professional development and internationalisation of visual artists after completing their Master’s degree.
Photo: Jan van Eyck Academie
The Jan van Eyck Academie is one of Europe’s most prestigious interdisciplinary residency centers. Each year, approximately 45 international artists, designers, writers, curators, architects, and other researchers are selected for the programme. The residency provides participants with time, space, and expertise to deepen their artistic practice and carry out new experiments.
The residency programme is part of a collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts and Saastamoinen Foundation, which strengthens the connections between art education and the international art scene.
The residency artists are united by curiosity, openness, and a commitment to artistic research. Their work embodies a critical and exploratory approach to art. During the residency, participants can make use of the academy’s five laboratories (Food, Material Matters, Photography & Audiovisual Media, Printing & Publishing, and Future Materials), as well as the departments of Nature Research and Education & Development. Additionally, they have access to a well-equipped library and the opportunity to participate in the academy’s public programme.
MFA graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki with adequate experience of independent artistic practice are welcome to apply. Duo’s and collectives consisting of maximum two artists are also welcome to apply; they share one residency.
The artists selected for the residency programme work in private studios and within the academy building for 11 months, receiving support from visiting advisors and staff. The residency offers a unique environment for deepening artistic research and building an international network.
Excerpt from the 2025 grantee Xiao Zhiyu’s blog, which describes Xiao’s residency experience at Jan van Eyck Academie:
” At Jan van Eyck, the vibrant discursive environment pushed me to go further in questioning the usefulness of artistic practice itself. I began wondering whether what I do merely upholds existing structures of language that endlessly rehearse the modernist myth of artistic genesis, affirm taste structures of upper-middle-class audiences, or simply cater to institutional mechanisms that channel grants and financial flows into cultural capital. If this were the case, what would remain genuinely valuable for me? Do memories, travel, digital archives, and historical narratives hold any real value at all (even the word “value” already revealing the system we inhabit) and if so, how could such unstable material remain present within a painted surface without immediately becoming legible?
…
Looking back, I now allow myself to grow thoughts through accumulation – travel notes, historical research, digital image archives, technical experiments, fragments of text rather than forcing them prematurely into finished form. To make art is to question what I am really interested in and how can I really constructing my personal frameworks in which images, memories, and histories can collide together, then maybe something nice appears.
The support from Saastamoinen Foundation and the University of the Arts Helsinki made it possible for me to fully inhabit this transformative phase of working. The outcomes of the residency are still unfolding in my current projects, and I believe it would last for a long long time: from making paintings as isolated objects toward building artistic systems capable of holding uncertainty, distance, and layered time. ”
Instructions for applying to the alumni residency Jan van Eyck Academie can be found here.
