Residencies 

This programme brings making into the museum, giving artists, designers, performers and creators unprecedented access to world-class arts resources, mentorship, studio space, creative programming and the opportunity to publicly display their work.

Each year, three creatives work for 12 months, full-time, based in a studio space at the V&A South Kensington. Each Adobe Creative Resident is paired with a curatorial mentor who acts as a guide to the collection throughout their time. Residents also work with a designated audience (schools, families or young people) and collaborate with the learning team to expand access to creativity, design and making. The programme ends with a display of their work at V&A South Kensington. Work from the previous year’s Adobe Creative Residents is now part of a free display at the V&A South Kensington until November 2026. More information can be found here.

The Adobe Creative Residency is supported by the Adobe Foundation.

Open calls for the Adobe Creative Residencies 2027 are now open. Information about the open calls and how to apply are available in a number of formats.

For general information about applying, please refer to the guidance notes.

This residency invites an architect or creative practitioner to explore the question: how do we live now - and how might we live differently in the future? Aligned with the V&A's ambitions during a period of transformation for its Architecture Gallery and drawing on the unique strengths of the V&A’s architecture collections, the residency will foreground design as lived experience, connecting everyday domestic life to broader questions of community, sustainability, policy, materials, and for whom, and how space is designed. Using housing and urban design –which could include social housing and housing justice - as a lens, the residency will be embedded with the V&A Schools Team and will work with students and teacher groups to think critically and creatively about home, community, and what equitable living might look like. This project approaches housing not only as architecture, but as a social, political, environmental, and ethical condition - one shaped by collective imagination as much as by buildings themselves.

We are particularly interested in inquiry-led, discussion-based approaches that position young people as community-makers: imagining prospective and alternative futures for housing, neighbourhoods, public space, and urban life. This may include exploring new models for living and community, collective and intergenerational housing, sustainable urban futures, adaptable shared spaces, or creative responses to climate and social change. It may also include digital visualisation techniques (e.g. VR, photogrammetry), model-making as a creative process, or speculative and participatory approaches to architecture and urban design.

The museum’s collections will act as both inspiration and provocation, connecting historic architectural drawings, models, and design practices to contemporary questions about sustainability, accessibility, belonging, policy, and how spaces can better support collective life.

We are looking for a practitioner to work with school children to critically investigate the house and housing systems while imagining alternative futures for urban life. The brief remains open to a range of practices but prioritises themes of inequality, sustainability, and lived experience, alongside inclusive engagement (including SEND and socio-economic access). We strongly encourage applications from practitioners currently underrepresented in architecture.

This residency invites an artist to work with the V&A’s Sculpture collection to explore sculpture as an active, evolving medium shaped through participation, play, and collective discovery. Central to the residency is a collaboration with the V&A Families team, working with children, families, and intergenerational audiences. This residency asks what sculpture is, and what it might become, when these groups are placed at the centre of the creative process. We are interested in practices that position participants, especially young ones, as co-creators: where making, imagining, testing, and responding become integral to the work itself.

The residency builds on the V&A’s long-standing commitment to hands-on creativity, asking how sculptural experiences can foster connection, wonder, and collective making across generations. Sculpture is understood here as a medium that is activated through interaction, shaped in real time rather than encountered as a fixed object. This focus on participation is inherently shaped by questions of access, representation, and meaning, and how contemporary practice can open more inclusive encounters with these objects. In this residency, digital tools or technologies may be used to support shared authorship or shift how sculpture is experienced in terms of scale, tactility, or presence.

The thematic framing is intentionally flexible. Artists may wish to explore ideas such as make-believe, myths, dreams, or speculative worlds. Equally, participation might be approached through material exploration, movement, storytelling, or social interaction. At its heart, the residency celebrates sculpture that comes to life through engagement.

This residency invites a choreographer, dancer, or movement-based artist to explore how dance can bring people together - centring movement as a shared, social, and creative act. At its core, the residency will focus on how choreography can create spaces for connection, exchange, and collective expression, positioning dance not only as performance but as a way of gathering, making, and building relationships. This residency will be embedded in the V&A Young People's team, working with young people as collaborators. The residency will prioritise co-creation and participation to support them in developing their own creative practice, increasing their creative confidence, and seeing performance as a safe space to discuss pertinent issues.

We are particularly interested in practices that support young people to shape and contribute to the work - exploring how movement can be a tool for communication, resilience, storytelling, and creative ownership. This may involve workshop-based processes, informal sharings, or evolving group-led outcomes that emerge over time. We are particularly interested in choreographic practices that are experienced live and in relation to place, exploring how dance might occur across and beyond gallery settings, inviting artists to consider how dance and movement might activate the museum’s galleries, courtyards, and surrounding environments, even where elements of the work are later captured or documented.

The residency should demonstrate a strong commitment to inclusive practice, engaging young people from a wide range of social, economic, and educational backgrounds, recognising dance as a vital space for cultural expression, identity, and community. We encourage artists to think about how their practice reaches, includes, and resonates with a broad range of participants, and how choreographic processes can support inclusive, accessible ways of working. Drawing on the resources and context of the V&A’s Theatre & Performance Dance Collection, the residency offers an opportunity to connect contemporary movement practices with wider questions of belonging, participation, and how young people come together through dance.

While the brief is intentionally open, artists might draw inspiration from forms of collective gathering - such as festivals, social dance, or carnival - where movement, music, and participation intersect. Equally, we welcome approaches that explore how choreographers build communities through ongoing collaboration, shared authorship, and co-production.

Information Sessions

To find out more and meet the Residencies Team, please come to an information session either online or at V&A South Kensington. Upcoming information sessions:

Shanti Bell

Rethinking Spaces - Furniture and Placemaking Residency
Focus audience: Young People

Shanti Bell is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice centres on creating experiential sculpture that is interactive, immersive, and often wearable. Her work explores the relationship between sculpture and the human form, conceptually navigating emotions and the complexities of human connection, family, and personal relationships.

For her residency, Shanti is interested in breaking down traditional barriers to art engagement by reimagining furniture as a medium for interaction. Globally recognised as an object of physical engagement, furniture offers a pathway to foster connection and challenge the conventions of gallery spaces. Through research into furniture design and collaborative exploration, she aims to create works that encourage touch, participation, and dialogue, while engaging young people in the creative process. In addition to spatial design and consideration of the spatial context of furniture, which are aspects she aims to build upon within her practice.

Shanti’s experience spans exhibitions, education, and community engagement. Her recent solo show The Room that Shared (2024) featured immersive sculptures activated by audience interaction, blurring boundaries between body and object. She has delivered workshops at Somerset House, Makerversity, and The King’s Foundation, focusing on design, research, and conceptual development.

Committed to accessibility, Shanti's focus for the residency is to create workshops for underrepresented groups that encourage creative empowerment and practical skills, in turn providing confidence in seeking continued pathways into the creative industry. Working with underrepresented groups, she aims to dismantle financial and confidence barriers to art participation, drawing on her own experience of navigating the realities of social and economic barriers.

Her practice combines material innovation with social engagement, aiming to unlock creativity and foster inclusive spaces for dialogue and expression.

"I am beyond excited to begin a residency at the V&A. The space that this residency will create will allow me to push my own creative boundaries as I navigate how to design and make works that not only encourage community and connection but are considerate of the historical landscape they will be placed within. I am particularly excited to be working with young people and developing experiences that encourage them to expand their own art practices and creative thinking.”

Emily Stapleton-Jefferis

Making and Meaning – Mixed Media Residency
Focus audience: Families

Emily Stapleton-Jefferis is a London-based visual artist working with a particular focus on ceramics. Her practice is rooted in clay’s tactile qualities as well as the transformative processes involved in its making. Emily’s work draws inspiration from human, botanical, and geological forms, often zooming in on overlooked details to reveal beauty and strangeness hidden in the natural world.

For her residency, Emily is interested in exploring repair as both a metaphor and an embodied act of care—connecting material processes with ideas of sustainability and community. She plans to experiment with transforming broken ceramics into mosaics and new objects, creating clays from crushed fragments, and reintroducing metalwork through casting waste metals into ceramic moulds. This research will bring together her personal practice and her community arts practice under a shared lens of care: for objects, people, and the environment.

Alongside her studio practice, Emily’s community arts practice includes delivering creative projects in galleries, museums, hospitals, and community settings. She has held residencies at Camden Arts Centre, St George’s Hospital, The Leonora Carrington Museum and worked on inclusive programmes such as MK Gallery’s Art and Us. Her workshops encourage playful material exploration, making art accessible to all ages and abilities. Through these engagements, Emily champions creativity as a powerful tool for connection and well-being.

“I’m so excited for this residency at the V&A. I’m interested in how repair can pull an object out of its tragic linear path towards landfill, allowing for new stories and richer relationships to develop. I find the tactility of things so affecting, I can’t wait to be immersed in the collections and conduct material research, whilst engaging with families”

Maria Than

Artificial Intelligence and the Digital World Residency
Focus Audience: Schools

Maria Than is a Vietnamese-British-French creative technologist, artist, and co-founder of the award-winning practice Ricebox Studio. Her multidisciplinary work spans augmented reality (AR), illustration, moving image, and creative AI, exploring themes of fragmented identities, Viet and Tibetan Buddhism, intergenerational trauma, and escapism.

For her residency, Maria seeks to integrate her expertise in creative technology with socially engaged practice, using digital tools to foster dialogue and accessibility. She is particularly interested in how emerging technologies can be demystified and used as vehicles for storytelling, cultural preservation, and community empowerment. Building on her recent solo exhibition Homage to Quan Âm (arebyte Gallery, 2024), which combined AI, AR, and handcrafted objects to explore Vietnamese Buddhist heritage, Maria plans to research new ways of blending immersive media with participatory design - creating spaces where lived experience and technology intersect.

Alongside her artistic practice, Maria lectures in digital and social design, creative AI ethics, and emerging technologies at institutions including Central Saint Martins, Camberwell College of Arts, and the University of Greenwich. She has led workshops and hackathons for universities, charities, and community groups worldwide, introducing AR and AI as tools for storytelling and activism.

Through Ricebox Studio, she has co-created installations with children and delivered projects addressing sustainability, identity, and digital inclusion. Committed to working with underrepresented communities, Maria advocates for equitable access to technology and creative education, drawing on her own experience of navigating socio-economic and cultural barriers. Her work combines technical innovation with a strong social mission, aiming to make creative tech a space for empowerment and collective imagination.

“I am extremely excited to be working with the Schools programme and my community partners to tackle the important challenge of teaching AI critically to young people and harness their unbridled sense of imagination to bring new perspectives on how AI can be designed, implemented and used by others.”

Meet and learn about our residents with drop-in creative workshops, open studio sessions, and resident-led activities. Aimed at families, young people and schools.

Our Residency programme has hosted a wide range of practitioners since it was established. Watch our films to get a first-hand account of the research and projects that our residents have carried out.