Artist Residency Opportunities Across East Africa
By The ArtCollect Desk · 20 July 2026 · 2 min read
Three real, checkable East African residency programs — Kuona Trust, Nafasi Art Space, and Weaver Bird Creative Centre — plus how to actually find an open call rather than a stale deadline.
The residency landscape in East Africa is real and growing, but application windows open and close on their own schedule — so this is a guide to the institutions themselves, not a list of currently-open calls that will be stale within weeks of publishing.
Kenya: Kuona Trust
Kuona Trust, based in Nairobi, is a non-profit dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art in Kenya. It runs residencies of one to three months, providing studio space, mentorship, and public engagement opportunities — one of the longest-running institutional supports for practising artists in the country.
Tanzania: Nafasi Art Space
Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam runs a comparable model: residencies of one to three months with studio space, accommodation, and support for public-facing events at the end of the residency period.
Uganda: Weaver Bird Creative Centre
Weaver Bird takes a cross-disciplinary approach, bringing visual artists together with musicians, writers, and performers in the same residency environment rather than keeping disciplines separate — worth knowing if your practice sits between mediums.
Beyond the region
International programmes do run open calls specifically for East Africa-based artists — the Delfina Foundation's twelve-week London residency and OneBeat Kenya's creative-leadership residency are two examples that have run recent cycles. Both had application windows that have already closed by the time of this writing, which is exactly why this article isn't listing dates: check each organisation's own site directly for their next call rather than trusting a date printed in an article that may be a year old by the time you read it.
How to actually use this list
Kuona Trust and Nafasi are the two with the steadiest, most established track record in the region specifically — start there if you're new to applying, and follow each organisation directly (not a secondhand roundup) for their actual current call.
— Otieno Odhiambo
Sources: Kuona Trust, Nafasi Art Space, and Weaver Bird Creative Centre's own published programme descriptions; Delfina Foundation and OneBeat Kenya's own call announcements.