About China Residencies


China Residencies' non-for-profit mission is to:
~ Map, research, and create a free online directory of opportunities
in mainland China & Hong Kong for creative people from all over the world.
~ Fund excellent creative people and projects through residencies and nurture
the next generation of organizers and administrators through fiscal sponsorship.
~ Support and advise existing and envisioned residency programs
across the region to foster sustainable creative exchange.

We believe diplomacy shouldn’t just be left up to politicians. Artists are cultural and social changemakers, and, in a world where people sometimes forget to listen to and learn from one another, we are passionate about creating opportunities for artists to bring a broader cultural understanding into their work and communities.


FAQ:
  • 1. What’s a residency?

    It’s a place (in real life or on the internet) that provides people with time & space to work on creative ideas & things.


  • 2. How do you decide which residencies to list?

    We strive to interview a staff member and at least one artist who’s participated in the program, and visit each residency in person during to make sure it’s "real" and worth considering.


  • 3. What if you can't tell if it's real?

    If we still can’t gather enough information to figure out if a residency is running, we’ll hold off on approving it and won’t post it online until we can find out for sure. If we can confirm a residency is closed, we'll move it to the archive.


  • 4. Why China?

    Our founders, Crystal Ruth Bell & Kira Simon-Kennedy, met while working at Red Gate in Beijing in 2009. Crystal started meeting with fellow residency directors and decided to create this website.


  • 5. Who’s behind all this?

    Crystal and Kira officially set up this nonprofit in 2013, shortly after Crystal was diagnosed with terminal cancer. They ran it together until she passed away on August 10, 2014.


  • 6. I'm sorry. Cancer sucks.

    Yup, it does. Kira continues to helm the organisation with the support of many wonderful people who serve on our board of directors, take part in our summer internship program, freelance to conduct, transcribe and translate dozens of interviews, and volunteer to help out in countless other ways.


  • 7. Where’s your office?

    It's the cloud! We don’t have a fixed office, so we work from wherever we are in the world (usually NYC) that has decent Internet access (and good VPNs to keep up with our Facebook, Twitter & Instagram!)


  • 8. Are you hiring?

    Not right now, but we always offer have paid summer internships and are launching a yearlong paid fellowship in 2019. And you can always get in touch if you'd like to know more about possibilities of working or volunteering with us.


  • 9. Where's the money from?

    From nice people like you! We’re a 501(c)3 registered nonprofit in the USA, which means we can receive tax-deductible donations. We throw a dumpling art party to fundraise each February, and also receive grants to create specific programs.


  • 10. What's fiscal sponsorship?

    We support other like-minded organizations by providing all the resources we have to share, including fiscal sponsorship, mentorship, fundraising advice, and project support. Right now, we support The W.O.W Project, BUFU & Yellow Jackets Collective. They are absolutely great, we highly encourage you support them too!


  • 11. Can you help me start and run a residency?

    Yes! We also give talks, workshops, and consult on all kinds of things related to starting and running residencies like figuring out budgets, recruiting and training staff. We can also help with translation, photography, web and graphic design, and lots of other things.


  • 12. What’s the Crystal Ruth Bell Residency?

    Each year, we pick a theme or an idea that Crystal would have liked, and send exceptional individuals and collectives to take part in a residency at Red Gate in her honor. So far, recipients include Jagrut Raval, Ming Lin & Alexandra Tatarsky, Ou Chiacheng & Zhao Wanqing, Raya Rayax & Rosie Elsior (Blood Becomes Water), Elyla Singuervenza, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and Catherine Sarah Young.


  • 12. What’s the Two To Three 二到三 residency?

    The Copyright Cultural Fund provided funding for two to three for artists from or based in Australia to return to 2nd and 3rd tier cities across China to continue a project or start a new one. Recipients include Astra Howard, Ian Bonner, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Joshua Hoare & Alicia King, and Louise Zhang & Natalie Abbott.



  • 13. What other fully-funded residencies can I apply to?

    We co-organize the 夜生活 Nightlife Residency with I: project space and The Neighborhood, collaborated with Found Sound, and also post lots of other opportunities, open calls and deadlines for residencies, jobs, and conferences in our News section & on social media. Not all residencies are fully-funded, but here's some tips on finding additional funding.



  • 14. What if I don’t want to go to China?

    That’s cool too! Staying home and working within one’s community is just as important as looking outward, and travelling anywhere is a great way to learn about the world. Check out lots of other creative opportunities all over the world on Rivet for residencies, fellowships, grants, and open calls.


Contact us at nihao@chinaresidencies.com with any more question,
and if you like what we're up to, please consider supporting us with a donation!

Our team

Team

  • Amanda Zhang

    Amanda Zhang

    Co-Director

    Since 2010, Amanda has been producing creative community spaces for Asian American, Asian diasporic, and queer & trans people of color communities. She is interested in solidarity economics, transformative justice, and art as a medium for collective engagement, and is pursuing an MBA at Brandeis' Heller Social Impact program.

  • Cleo Miao

    Cleo Miao

    Residency Coordinator

    Cleo was born in Zhejiang, China, and lived in Boston and New York before moving to Hamburg for an MA. She is a visual artist, film producer, animator, and designer playing with the absurdity and romance of digital tools and culture. She also produces underground electronic music and has been performing and DJing under the name 10_r3n.

  • Josue Chavez

    Josue Chavez

    Curator

    Josue Chavez is doctoral student in the Hispanic program at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on contemporary artists from Central America and their relationship to global political economy. He conducted many artist interviews for China Residencies since 2018 and is the co-curator of Meme Tactics.

  • Kira Simon-Kennedy

    Kira Simon-Kennedy

    Co-Founder & Co-Director

    After working at Red Gate residency in 2009, Kira and Crystal started China Residencies to support, promote, and interlink creative spaces in China and beyond. She continues running it to this day in Crystal's honor. Kira is also one of the co-founders of Rivet, and produces independent films.

  • Quinn Chen 陈崑怡

    Quinn Chen 陈崑怡

    Community Coordinator

    Quinn an artist and recent graduate of Reed College in cultural Anthropology. They previously lived in Shanghai where they wrote for online journalism source Sixth Tone and organized events that promoted queer solidarity. Quinn is also a designer and movement artist interested in the boundaries between material and flesh in an increasingly mechanic world.

  • Shahong Lee

    Shahong Lee

    Residency Director

    Shahong Lee is the Artist Residency Director at China Residencies and a documentary film producer. Previously, she has worked as the literary editor of Barakunan, an art collective in Beirut, Lebanon. As a writer, farmer, and artist, Shahong is passionate about building a more sustainable and equitable arts ecosystem for artists around the world.

  • Xiaoyao Xu

    Xiaoyao Xu

    Researcher

    Xiaoyao Xu is a contributing writer on the Chinese independent cultural scene. She is an artist and researcher, having done research on temporary clusters with the Sonic Acts Festival Amsterdam. She received the residency research fellowship (2019), working with China Residencies in New York and I: project space in Beijing.

Board Members

  • Adam Short

    Adam Short

    Advisory Board

    Adam Short is the Associate Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at Virginia Tech. He formerly coordinated corporate and foundation efforts in the Northeast region for the American Red Cross, and worked as the Development & Program Manager at the Alliance of Artist Communities, where he worked in tandem with the Asian Cultural Council to organized and lead an exploratory visit to China to survey the burgeoning field of artist residency programs. Adam holds a bachelor of arts degree from Reed College and a master of business administration degree from Bryant University.

  • An Xiao Mina

    An Xiao Mina

    Governing Board

    An Xiao Mina is a technologist, writer and artist. She leads the product team at Meedan, and is an affiliate researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Passionate about issues of global justice, technology and creative expression, An Xiao is also co-founder of The Civic Beat, a global research collective focused on the creative side of civic technology. An Xiao Mina is author of Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Beacon Press, January 2019).

  • Christina Xu

    Christina Xu

    Advisory Board

    Christina is an ethnographer helping organizations understand how their customers incorporate technology into their lives, with over a decade of experience in observing and orchestrating social interactions on the internet and in offline subcultural spaces in China and the U.S. She writes about the Chinese social media landscape for Magpie Kingdom with Tricia Wang & Pheona Chen, and teaches Entrepreneurial Design in the SVA Interaction Design MFA program with Gary Chou. "I believe in translation as an art, empathy as a foundation, and GIF hoarding as a methodology."

  • Ian Yang

    Ian Yang

    Advisory Board

    Ian Yang is currently based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and works as Advisor China, Japan and South Korea at DutchCulture, centre for international cooperation. Yang was a grantee of the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship by the European Commission (2009-2011). In the past 10 years he has been involved in a variety of artistic and cultural exchange projects between Europe and East Asia, and a freelance art critic and writer for Chinese language magazines and online media. Among others, he worked as assistant curator for the exhibition Snapshots of Tourism at the Helsinki International Artist Program (HIAP) in 2010; curatorial fellow at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam on the exhibition project Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists collaborating with Beijing’s Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art; programmer for CinemAsia Film Festival, Amsterdam (2016-18), programmer of the cultural programme NEDxPO of the Netherlands in South Korea in 2018, curator of exhibition Scene Unseen: contemporary design from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden at He Xiang Ning Art Museum, Shenzhen in 2019.

  • Jason Li

    Jason Li

    Advisory Board

    Jason Li is an independent designer, cartoonist and researcher working at the intersection of storytelling, technology and social change. His practice focuses on amplifying underrepresented voices, creating alternative media ecosystems, and making digital safety more accessible. Previous works have appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Asian Art Museum, on the BBC and on the radio in Spain. He also serves as an editor at Paradise Systems, a publisher of exemplary comics from the US and China, and at 88 Bar, a group blog about technology, media and design in the Greater China region

  • Jay Brown

    Jay Brown

    Governing Board

    Jay Brown founded Lijiang Studio in 2004, an arts practice based in a rural farming village in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Since then, Lijiang Studio has facilitated and produced numerous residencies, exhibitions and events in urban, rural, domestic, public, and private settings. These events are co-curated with the artists involved and with members of that local community. Before Lijiang Studio, Jay worked at the Nature Conservancy’s China Program, based in Yunnan, and at various museums including the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jay graduated from Princeton University in 2001 with a degree in Art History and certificate in East Asian Studies.

  • Melissa Karmen Lee

    Melissa Karmen Lee

    Advisory Board

    Melissa is a literature and visual arts academic, curator, archivist and storyteller with research interests in public art and social engagement. Currently, Melissa is the Curator of Education and Public Programs at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong. Melissa graduated from McGill and Canterbury Universities with a Master of Arts in literature, and worked on the curatorial team of the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale, as well as on several projects as a freelance curator including curator at large at Slought Foundation, University of Pennsylvania co-curating 2 digital exhibitions on the cloud. Melissa is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Lancaster on the subject of post 1989 transnational Chinese visual art and culture.

  • Miles Greenberg

    Miles Greenberg

    Advisory Board

    Miles Greenberg is a French Canadian-born and Paris-based young queer artist and curator of mixed Russian/Ukrainian and African-American ancestry. His practice consists primarily of process-based, long-durational performance installations, as well as photography and video. He also has a background in contemporary dance, drag performance, perfumery and film work.

  • Minsoo Thigpen

    Minsoo Thigpen

    Advisory Board

    Minsoo works at Microsoft during the day and helps run an online art books publishing collective (hyperlinkpress.com) and paints at night, after she became disillusioned with the euro-centric/exploitative art world. She works in the domain of AI and ethics building tools to help data scientists practice machine learning more responsibly (secret: it's going to take a fucking long time), she used to love traveling a lot but now in pandemic mostly spends time taking care of her vegetable garden and grows perilla leaves. She learned Korean cooking (Maangchi is her hero) to become closer to her mom and feeds her friends yummy things as the ultimate act of love and care. She believes in recuperative art practices and storytelling to give voice to marginalized/erased histories. To share the advantage of her corporate privilege, she organizes donation matching to redistribute corporate money to organizations that most need it : https://tinyurl.com/donationmatching4blm

  • Pamela Liou

    Pamela Liou

    Governing Board

    Pamela is an artist and technologist working in Brooklyn, NY. Working with arts organizations such as Eyebeam, Museum of Arts and Design, and PS1 has given her a felt appreciation for both the vibrancy of NYC's artist communities as well as the challenges that organizations face in fostering those they purport to support. As a board member, Pamela hopes to always center the artists' needs so that they can get back to their urgent work with the care and guidance they deserve.

  • Rachel Marsden

    Rachel Marsden

    Governing Board

    Rachel Marsden is a curator, researcher, educator, bookbinder and arts writer focusing on transcultural studies, cultural translation and curatorial practices in China and the Asia-Pacific. Originally from the UK, Rachel has lived in New York, Shanghai & Melbourne, where she founded and managed the Art Curatorship Partnership Projects at the University of Melbourne. Rachel was awarded a PhD through the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA), Birmingham City University (BCU), UK in 2017.

  • Samantha Culp

    Samantha Culp

    Advisory Board

    Samantha Culp is a California-born writer, curator and creative producer based between Los Angeles and Shanghai. She has spent the past decade in greater China, first in Hong Kong, then in Beijing and Shanghai. Samantha is the founder and director of New Territories, an experimental studio for research and production, which develops projects and events spanning art, cinema, and design. She is the founding curator of Tulou Open House, a site-specific creative experiment, residency, and conference at a traditional tulou in rural Fujian Province. She co-founded Paloma Powers, a creative agency developing artist-led solutions for realms far beyond the art world.

  • Zara Arshad

    Zara Arshad

    Governing Board

    Zara Arshad is a curator, writer and design historian specialising in twentieth- and twenty first-century material and visual culture from East Asia. She has previously held roles at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Design History Society UK, Beijing Design Week, and Icograda Beijing 2009. Arshad is currently a PhD researcher based between the University of Brighton and V&A, and one half of the studio Geofictions with artist Yaloo.

Summer Internship

  • Angel Tillery

    Angel Tillery

    2018

    Angel is an artist, designer, and curator based in Beijing. She graduated from Bowie State University, where she studied digital media arts and studied abroad for three semesters in Harbin at Heilongjiang University and served as the President of American Students of the International Student Association. Angel interned at W. W. Norton & Company in NYC before moving to Beijing.

  • Hong Zhang 张弘

    Hong Zhang 张弘

    2013

    Hong is currently a senior visual designer at Alibaba in Hangzhou. She studied visual communication at Virginia Commonwealth University and has an undergraduate degree from Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

  • Jialong Li 李家隆

    Jialong Li 李家隆

    2015

    Jialong Li 李家隆 graduated from CUNY, Queens College, with Master degrees in Urban Studies in 2015, and holds a BA in Publishing & Arts from Sichuan University in Chengdu. He is originally from Beijing and has lived in New York since 2013.

  • Julia Malleck 李慧

    Julia Malleck 李慧

    2014

    Julia interned for China Residencies during the summer of her junior year at Tufts, where she graduated with a major in International relations & English, and spent time studying abroad at SOAS in London. After graduation, she worked at think tanks and nonprofits in Washington, DC, and is currently a Princeton in Asia fellow in Beijing.

  • Mandy You 游祎豆

    Mandy You 游祎豆

    2020

    Mandy is a sophomore at Wellesley College studying philosophy and computer science. She was born and raised in Wuhan, China and enjoys cooking, writing poetry, and upcycling vintage clothing in her free time. She is passionate about serving the local immigrant community in Boston.

  • Marvis Zou 邹晓童

    Marvis Zou 邹晓童

    2015

    Marvis Zou has recently graduated from Columbia University with a Master's Degree in Nonprofit Management. She is currently looking for opportunities in the nonprofit sector in New York City. Marvis is a steelpan musician (you might see her perform on the subway platforms), sailor, and Iyengar yogi. She is an advocate of diversity.

  • Sally Yi Cao

    Sally Yi Cao

    2013

    Sally Yi Cao is the Curatorial & Education Program Manager at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg. She studied accounting as an undergraduate in Beijing and earned a masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon.

  • Sophia Wu

    Sophia Wu

    2015

    Sophia graduated with a B.A. in Economics from St. Mary's College of Maryland then studied Journalism at Georgetown. She is a designer, writer, photographer, and creator of the independent magazine QING.

  • Yixin Sam Gong 龚翊鑫

    Yixin Sam Gong 龚翊鑫

    2016

    Yixin (Sam) Gong is a curator and researcher originally from Xiamen. After working at Organhaus in Chongqing, he moved to New York to study Art History at Rutgers University. In 2015, he completed the curatorial internship at Bangkok University Gallery contemporary art projects between Japan, China, and Thailand. He co-curated Roadside Picnic at Chambers Fine Arts in NYC, "a celebration of the state in flux as our global world rattles anxiously and attentively."

Past Board Members & Contributors

  • Former Board Members

    Former Board Members

    We thank and remember the many wonderful board members who contributed advice over the years:

    Nancy Murphy, Brian Wallace, Kristin Congdon, Catherine Croll, Ed Dadey, Gordon Laurin, Joanne Wei-ching Chen, Daniel Szehin Ho, Emma Karasz, Ming Lin, Thea Baumann, Maïa Sert, Christina Yuen Zi Chung

  • Freelance contributors:

    Freelance contributors:

    Contributing Writers, Filmmakers, Illustrators, Researchers & Editors

    Film & Video: Li-Lian Ahlskog-Hou, Nathaniel J. Brown, Grace Naw / Beijing Program Manager: Jennifer Lindsay / Writing & Editing: Rebecca Catching, Fei Liu, Iona Whittaker, Yang Yiran, Willem Molesworth / Illustration: Diane Zhou

  • Mikail Wright Kwon

    Mikail Wright Kwon

    Co-Curator & Designer

    Mikail is a Visual Artist, Designer and Researcher from the Washington D.C. metro area whose practice focuses on intercultural interactions, folk art and queer communities. His family business, The Jackson Family Art Show, an arts management company in the area sowed an interest in the arts from a young age. After studying abroad at Heilongjiang University in Harbin, China for three semesters he transferred to the University of Maryland, College Park to complete his undergraduate degree in Chinese Literature. He is currently learning to code to pursue a new path as a web developer and game designer.

  • Shaonan Xi 郗少男

    Shaonan Xi 郗少男

    Beijing Fellow ~ January - July 2019

    Shaonan is interested in queerness, biopolitics, planetarity, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Shaonan is originally from Kunming and is now based in Shanghai after studying art history at Macalester College in Minnesota.