Discover the Mead Fellowship awards, hosted by UAL's Careers and Employability every December. These awards are your gateway to success, aimed at final year BA/BSc/MA and PhD students seeking to craft outstanding arts award applications. Details for the 2024 Mead Fellowships, opening in December 2023, can be found here.
Our application process provides an opportunity to learn about arts fundraising and grant application skills. Regardless of whether you receive the Fellowship, you'll gain valuable insights. We offer 3 webinars, 8 live online Q&As, and an online learning module called "Planning Your Creative Project" to help applicants make compelling and aspirational submissions.
In 2023, we received 131 eligible applications in stage 1, providing individual feedback to all. From those, 34 applicants progressed to stage 2, creating detailed proposals. The top 8 finalists presented their projects to a panel of senior UAL staff, chaired by Vice Chancellor James Purnell. 4 finalists were awarded a Mead Fellowship in 2023. You can read more about their projects below.
Rebeca Binda
MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, London College of Communication
Iyabá: Women as Agents of Resistance
Image credits (L to R): Rebeca Binda, photo by Sara Romanin Jacur; drone photo of the Amazon by Rebeca Binda; Cacica Ãgoho Pataxó, photo by Rebeca Binda
Rebeca will produce a photographic series delving into the vital role of intergenerational female leaders from traditional communities, across diverse and endangered Brazilian biomes. Through the language of art and storytelling, Iyabá will weave an enchanting tapestry, capturing the essence of Black, quilombola, and Indigenous women, as well as women from rural and riverine communities in Latin America.
In Iyabá, these women are recognised as Guardians of Wisdom, of resistance, resilience, and innovation. The project will preserve their ancestral knowledge. through a diverse range/spectrum of artistic expressions: songs, music, poems, dances, recipes, sewing, and handicrafts. It aims to empower future generations with a profound appreciation for their cultural heritage, environmental preservation, and social change.
The project highlights the vital importance of incorporating their ancestral wisdom into educational settings, nurturing a deeper connection to our roots, and fostering a harmonious relationship with the world around us. Rebeca aims to create a collective understanding of the interconnected threads that shape our shared existence. She aims to provide accessible educational resources that support this mission.
"I'm thrilled and incredibly grateful for the Mead Fellowship, an opportunity that fills my heart with immense appreciation. It marked a turning point, being my first significant grant. This grant gave me a boost of confidence that changed how I saw myself and my ideas. It opened doors, shaping a career path I hadn't expected.
This Fellowship represents the fulfilment of a long-held dream, a project I've poured my heart into for years. As a Brazilian woman, I've seen ancestral wisdom fade, leading to the neglect of local communities.
With the Mead Fellowship's support and the assistance of its incredible team, I embark on a collaborative journey with the participant communities to bring forth the profound significance of their traditions. Together, we aim to challenge prevailing narratives, amplify marginalised voices, and foster understanding and respect for both the environment and cultural heritage.”
Margarita (Margo) Galandina
MA Photography, London College of Communication
Preserving Captured Memories of Buryat-Mongol Folklore in Siberia
Image credits (L to R): Self-portrait; Fieldwork Sites map; Family portrait of my great grandfather and his mother, taken in 1931, photographer unknown.
Margo’s project focuses on ethnographic research and photographic documentation of the Buryat-Mongol indigenous people of South-Eastern Siberia (Zabaikalye region). She will record their folklore, the spoken endangered Buryat language and their nomadic traditions encompassing an authentic combination of Shamanist and Buddhist worldviews. Her practice investigates the ephemeral nature of individual memory and how it is affected by photographic representation.
Margo will travel to remote sites in rural Buryatia, which hold traces of her ancestors' past based on historical recollections of her extended family. Most of these sites have perished in time due to 1930’s Soviet collectivisation and policies towards Indigenous Siberian people. Working on-site and with the ethnographic museum's photographic archive, she will collaborate with the local community, record their histories, photograph the landscape, and interweave it with her research findings and observational drawing.
The project will culminate in a photographic exhibition presented in London in 2024. It will include Margo’s fieldwork research findings and photographic prints showcasing her collaborative work with the Buryat community, celebrating the ingenious beauty of this land, its folklore and complex history.
“When I received the result, it has brought an immense feeling of inner joy and a belief that the type of work I’m doing holds value, beyond personal gain. I feel extremely grateful to have the chance to be able to continue my work on Indigenous Siberian heritage. I hope this project will add to the photography sector championing erased histories of Buryat people and will benefit the community long-term.”
Alexandre Tarek
MSc Creative Computing, Creative Computing Institute
Silicon Prophecies
Image credits (L to R): Alexandre Tarek, photo by Adam Muscat; Born To Hate performance piece at Les Urbaines 2022 festival in Lausanne, Switzerland, performed by GOLCE, photo by Cynthia Mai Ammann; Not There Yet, photo by Dian Joy
Alexandre Tarek's work looks into the ways humans understand their relationships with technical systems. He uses emerging technologies to create sculptures, installations, videos, and digital art that question conventional technological imaginaries.
His project Silicon Prophecies addresses the misrepresentation of artificial intelligence in mainstream news media. Marked by their sensationalism, these portrayals foster misplaced anxiety and enthusiasm for these technologies while distracting from their more immediate threats. Silicon Prophecies aims to shake off these myths and suggest more helpful ways to make sense of our rapidly changing technological environment.
To do this, Tarek will engage in an online discourse as he develops a robotic artwork, sharing thoughts, research and visual documentation along the way. Updates about this process will be posted on his Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/alexa_trademark/).
“This Award will take my career to the next level by preparing me to manage and deliver long-running projects to the highest standard. It is a great opportunity to create well-researched and compelling work, and I will ensure that I make the most of it.”
Noah Ndero Tjijenda
BA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, London College of Communication
Echoes of History: Preserving Namibia’s Cultural Heritage
Image credits (L to R): Self-portrait by Noah Tjijenda; My father in 2018 by Noah Tjijenda; Map of research areas, image Creative Commons
Noah’s project will aggregate new and old content about the history of the Herero people – a history mostly recorded orally. Taking the biased written history of a colonised Namibia as a starting point, he will interview some of the Herero generation aged above 80 - their personal stories and experiences conveyed to them by their elders through their lifetime.
The project aims to capture perspectives from pre-colonial times, before the German genocide killed 80% of the Herero population, and exiled survivors. While also collecting and combining information creating a new educational resource, for current and future generations.
“I am incredibly thankful for having had a chance to go through the process of applying for the Mead Fellowship. The way the award was set up was great to learn and grow, while getting incredible feedback and invaluable insights. Especially being a recent graduate, these barriers felt hardest to overcome at this stage of my career – getting the trust of others to create something new, something important. I am incredibly excited to embark on this important passion project.”