Program: Culture and Art

Soros Arts Fellowship

The Soros Arts Fellowship supports innovative mid-career artists and cultural producers advancing social change around the world. The fellowship provides artists with the resources to develop a large-scale project on their own terms in their own local contexts.

Grant

Moving Walls Fellowship

Moving Walls is an annual thematic exhibition series that explores a variety of social justice and human rights issues through documentary practice, and is produced by Culture and Art. The Moving Walls Fellowship supports the creation of an ongoing or new body of work on a specific theme.

Voices October 27, 2016 Yukiko Yamagata

A Photo Exhibit Explores Life in the “Urban Now”

The collaboration between a photographer and an anthropologist takes viewers inside Congo’s urban spaces.

Voices March 5, 2019

Q&A: Fearless Theater in Kosovo

With their latest production, an ambitious theater troupe is challenging homophobia, facing down death threats, and changing minds.

Voices October 23, 2017 Rashida Bumbray

The Theater Challenging One of the World’s Most Repressive Governments

The Belarus Free Theatre has long been a monument to democracy and human rights—and the target of one of the world’s worst dictatorships. Cofounder Natalia Kaliada explains why, despite the persecution, the show goes on.

Voices September 13, 2018 Yukiko Yamagata & Siobhan Riordan

Announcing Moving Walls 25: Another Way Home

Moving Walls 25: Another Way Home is an exhibition and fellowship honoring artists, journalists, and creative technologists who use documentary practice to explore the topic of migration.

Voices February 21, 2017 David Mansfield

A Flourishing in the Deserts of Afghanistan. But for How Long?

A photo exhibition looks at the human stories driving a tenuous environmental revolution in Afghanistan.

Voices April 21, 2015 Siobhan Riordan

Five Photographers Present Journeys Toward Freedom, Safety, and Self-Determination

From the creative act of authorship to the formidable journey to escape slavery, the stories highlighted in the next installment of the Moving Walls photography series explore people in pursuit of new worlds.

Voices April 26, 2018

How the Market Photo Workshop Has Invested in South African Photographers

Market Photo Workshop’s Lekgetho Makola, artist Lebohang Kganye, and Africa Is a Country’s Sean Jacobs discuss the role of photography in shaping memory and contemporary culture in South Africa.

Voices September 26, 2019 Patrick Gaspard

Embracing the Arts in an Era of Disruption

At a time when many of the rules we once took for granted no longer apply, how can we respond with boldness, fearlessness, and creativity? Culture and art are part of the answer.

Voices August 26, 2020

Q&A: Racial Justice and Restitution

During a moment of reckoning with the legacies of racism, the African Foundation for Development is working to return objects to Africa that were looted during the eras of colonialism and imperialism.

Event October 28, 2020

The Inside Outsider: Reconstructing the Black American Narrative

As storytellers working on the frontlines of protest, photographers Devin Allen and Ruddy Roye will discuss creating new narratives and combating the misrepresentation of Black communities and resistance.

Event November 19, 2020

Can Healing Be Our North Star? Reimagining Health, Well-Being, and Collective Liberation

Critiquing how Western-based health models and frameworks can serve as instruments of racism and violence, a panel of scholars, artists, and activists discusses the role of healing in political liberation and well-being.

Event January 21, 2020

Resistance in a Time of Fear: Through Shahidul Alam’s Lens

Time magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, Shahidul Alam, talks about photography, activism, and the right to expression.

Press release April 25, 2019

Open Society Foundations Announce 2019 Soros Arts Fellows

Now in its second year, the Fellowship supports artists and cultural producers working on migration and public space.

Press release July 14, 2020

Open Society Foundations Announce 2020 Soros Arts Fellows

Now in its third year, the Soros Arts Fellowship honors artists and cultural producers working on migration and public space.

Staff

Rashida Bumbray

Rashida Bumbray is director of Culture and Art at the Open Society Foundations.

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