We invite applications to our flagship Civic Freedom Residency from scholars, writers, journalists, and artists (including visual artists, musicians, photographers, cinematographers, and other audio-visual and cross-disciplinary practitioners) from outside Ukraine, to spend time working in our extraordinary city. We welcome creators and thinkers who reject censorship, refuse orthodoxy, dare to say things that may be unpopular or even incorrect, and choose curiosity and openness — especially when times are hard. The residency runs for up to one month in Odessa between April and October 2026.
Odessa has long embodied the spirit of Enlightenment irreverence: a city founded around an opera house rather than a cathedral; defiantly modern, dissident, cosmopolitan, and polyglot; a place where ideas, people, and arguments have always freely mixed. Even now, in Ukraine’s darkest days, Odessa holds fast to its tradition of civic freedom and open exchange.
The Civic Freedom Residency breathes new life into this tradition. It brings an independent, courageous thinker or creator from abroad into conversation with the city’s own scholars, writers, and artists, and helps shape a wider cultural community committed to defending creative and intellectual freedom. The residency is part of our Enlightenment project: the defence of curiosity, plurality, and public reason; the belief that knowledge thrives through cross-field holism, where thought, art, and civic life mutually illuminate.
Applications will be reviewed by the Cosmopolis team, which will select the resident based on the quality and originality of the proposed work, and its engagement with questions of civic freedom, pluralism, and public reason.
The resident will be invited to share their work with Odessa’s audiences — through talks, exhibitions, masterclasses, performances, or workshops, which the Cosmopolis team will help organise — and to take part in the city’s public life. Together, we aim to create spaces where people can think, imagine, argue, make things together, and engage in open, free-spirited debate steered by reason and guarded by civility, rather than dogma.
The residency is sponsored by the British Sutasoma Trust and includes travel support from Europe, accommodation in Odessa for up to one month (which we help to arrange), local insurance for the duration of the stay, and a subsistence stipend of €500, calibrated to typical incomes in Odessa’s cultural sphere. The programme is run in close coordination with local partners and follows current security guidance.
The application deadline is Friday 27 February 2026.

Sponsor a Residency
If you wish to sponsor a Civic Freedom Residency, we warmly welcome your support. Residencies are a cornerstone of our work: they build real human bridges between Odessa’s creative community and colleagues across the world.
A month in Odessa gives residents the time to think, work, and live alongside the city’s artists, writers, scholars, and musicians — and, as so often happens, to fall in love with the place. At the same time, Odessa gains fresh ideas, new collaborations, and a living connection to wider cultural and intellectual worlds.
Residents often write about the city, carry its stories with them, and become its advocates abroad. Your sponsorship makes this exchange possible and strengthens Odessa’s voice on the global cultural map.
Cosmopolis provides all administrative support, and $3,000 is sufficient to fund a month-long residency. Sponsors may also indicate the field from which they would like us to select a resident (a writer, journalist, photographer, artist, scholar, scientist, etc.). Residencies may be named after their sponsors or institutions.
To explore sponsoring a residency, please get in touch with us through the form below.