Young Artist Bursary
Empowering and working alongside young people has always been at the heart of what we do at Phakama. Supporting young people's creativity is what drives us and makes this organisation special.
We want to encourage and support young people to bring their creative ideas to life by offering seed funding of up to £1000 a year to a creative young person or group aged 16-25.
We hope that this seed funding will give them the opportunity to test out ideas, and develop their creativity whilst complementing Phakama’s vision.
This bursary should help young people realise their potential to create and lead daring projects!
Each young person is also paired with one of our Associate Artists who acts as a mentor, through the project process.
The Young Artist Bursary helped me to create and gain the exact experience I was looking for.
- Lizzie, joint 2018 Young Artist Bursary Awardee
It's an opportunity every young artist longs for.
- Ellis, 2017 Young Artist Bursary Awardee
2021 Young Artist Bursary Project:
Maritsa Baksh - Creative Pandemic: Young, Black & Queer Story Collection
Image by Lily Richards
The Creative Pandemic (TCP) is a creative writing website setup by Maritsa Baksh as a labour of love. Her project will publish the work of 6 queer PoC writers of short stories, aged 18-30.
Submissions are now open for pieces of work that relate to one of three themes: Red, Fantasy, and Expression.
If your work is selected you will not only be published in the TCP website, but you’ll also be awarded a small writers fee! For more info go to:https://www.thecreativepandemic.com
Past Young Artist Bursary Projects:
Lily Richards 2020
Inspired by Arvind Gupta's toys from trash, Lily began looking for ways to make juggling clubs and balls from waste materials such as broken bicycle inner tubes, single use plastic and used foil. She planned to take her skills to refugee camps in Greece to simultaneously
improve mental health through creativity and clean up the environment the refugees live in.
Unfortunately, due to the pandemic this was not possible, so Lily turned her practice into an easy to use handbook - you can download a copy here.
COMMUNITY CRAFT COLLECTIVE
LOOP'N'LINK
14 young people, aged 17-25 were recruited to be part of Loop'n'link's first production "What If *" addressing the subject of migration in East London. Over two intensive weeks in August, Belisa and Elizabeth worked with performers, musicians, designers and spoken word artists and technicians, to create a multi disciplinary performance from scratch.
Every aspect of the production was lead by a young person including the documentary, promotion, tech and documentation.
Lizzie Adejimi & Belisa Branças
2018
Eloïse Poulton & Elinor Lipman
BAD AUNTS
2019
Bad Aunts is an intergenerational comedy, discussing the underrepresentation and often reductive depiction of older women in mainstream entertainment, that had a full run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019.
Phakama supported the recording of a podcast and the delivery of a community focus group, both discussed "female ageing in the arts" with women aged 40-70. The findings from these were used as material for script development.
Ellis Lewis-Dragstra
2017
Ellis Lewis-Dragstra was awarded our first Young Artist Bursary. The By Artist Gallery is a roaming pop up gallery, inviting emerging artists of any practice and any subject matter to display their work.
The gallery was launched at Rich Mix during their Youth Take Over Festival. 13 talented young artists exhibited their work, 69% had never exhibited their work outside of school or University before.
THE BY ARTIST GALLERY