Applications are now open for our Spring–Summer 2026 Civic Courage Residency, funded by the Sutasoma Trust.
We are launching a program of Odessa Cosmopolis Residencies for scholars, artists, writers, photographers, journalists, and anyone else from outside Ukraine who wishes to spend time working in our extraordinary city. We invite those who reject censorship, refuse orthodoxy, dare to say things that may be unpopular or incorrect, and choose curiosity and openness even — and especially — when times are hard.
Odessa has long embodied the spirit of Enlightened irreverence: a city founded around an opera house rather than a cathedral; defiantly modern, multilingual, cosmopolitan, dissident; 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.
Our Civic Courage Residencies are our way of breathing new life into this tradition. They are designed to bring free, courageous creators and thinkers from around the world into close conversation with the city’s own artists, scholars, writers, musicians, and scientists — to help shape a global cultural community that defends its members' creative and intellectual freedom. The residencies are 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.
Residents 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. Our aim is simple: to create spaces where people can think, argue, imagine, and make things together, and engage in open, free-spirited debate steered by reason and guarded by civility, not dogma.
Each residency includes travel support from Europe, accommodation in Odessa for up to one month, medical insurance for the duration of the stay, and a modest stipend.
The application deadline is Friday 30 January 2026.

Sponsor a Residency
If you wish to sponsor a Civic Courage 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 $2,000 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.