Emergent is a hybrid residency and bursary programme delivered in collaboration with Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead. Each year, the award is given to an emerging disabled artist with a socially-engaged practice and a small cohort of shortlisted artists are offered tailored support. This year’s recipient of the three month residency and £5k bursary is Emma Bentley Fox.

The applications
It was wonderful to see such a strong pool of applicants for the Emergent programme once again this year. Similar to 2022, we received just under 100 applications, from which one main awardee and a shortlist of four artists were selected by the Shape and Baltic programme teams. 
This year, our priorities for candidates centred on learnings from the pilot year. Namely, now having a better understanding of what support emerging disabled artists need currently as well as how this matches on to what both organisations are able to provide, we were particularly looking for artist…