Artist in Residence – East

2026 is the year in which we mark 200 years since UCL’s establishment as the first University in London. The ambition of the bicentenary is to celebrate and reinforce UCL’s founding values, to highlight the excellence and impact of UCL’s groundbreaking work, and to present an ambitious and inspiring portrait of our future. As well as reflecting on our past, we will use the bicentenary year to frame the future, to position ourselves as a forward-facing university and to convey the type of organisation we will become during our third century.

Through the UCL200 Public Art programme we will appoint three artists in residence to explore, celebrate, and challenge the culture of the institution at this important moment in its history. These artists will be appointed with three key areas of focus: UCL’s Student Community in partnership with UCL Students’, UCL’s East campus and UCL’s historic Bloomsbury campus.

The artist in residence at the UCL East campus will embed themselves within UCL’s east London campus which opened in September 2023 on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in the heart of the UK’s newest culture and innovation quarter, East Bank, which brings students together with world experts in sciences, arts, and humanities to explore solutions to key challenges facing the planet. The new east London campus’s focus is on interdisciplinarity across undergraduate and graduate degree programmes and research.

A commitment to working with east London communities and artists sits at the heart of our approach. The artist will use the residency to embed, learn and collaborate with a view to creating (or co-creating) an artwork or intervention which demonstrates UCL East’s core values, and its commitment to interconnectedness going well beyond our academic communities. Exemplifying UCL’s ambition for a porous relationship between institution and community; operating both as an academic community and a civic space.