Artist in Residence – Student Community

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 ground breaking 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’s Students’ Union, UCL’s East campus and UCL’s historic Bloomsbury campus.

The artist in residence, in partnership with Students Union UCL, will embed themselves within the UCL student body and alumni engaging with its community and using it as a tool to understand the student’s key drivers which they identify with beyond their academic journey. The artist will use these learnings to create an artwork or intervention which benefits the Student Community, rather than interrogate UCL’s past it will look optimistically to the future of UCL’s student journey. The student community is central to the work of the University; its teaching and learning. It is crucial that we reach and engage them. This residency will look to an artist or collective to position themselves at UCL to be relevant and encourage engagement from the diverse, 51,000+ strong student community representing over 150 nationalities at UCL.

• Artist fee: £12,000

• Artwork production budget: £3,000 (managed by UCL Public Art)