AWrI 2025 Dates: July 12 – August 2
Applications are now closed.
Public Lectures | RSVP using these links.
Sat July 19 – 12 PM EST – Brenda Marie Osbey
Sat July 26 – 12 PM EST – Marsha Pearce
Sat August 2 – 12 PM EST – Siddhartha Mitter
AWrI Cohort Schedule (All times listed are EST)
Saturday July 12 – 12-2PM
Sat July 19 – 11AM-2PM
Sat July 26 – 11AM-2PM
Sat August 2 – 11AM-3PM
The Art Writing Incubator is an annual online writing intensive, which cultivates the next generation of critics and art writers through a series of workshops with leading culture writers and artists from around the world and one-on-one tutorials with Burnaway’s editors. Much of the program is funded by Critical Minded, which supports emerging writers of color, LGBTQ+ writers, and writers in rural communities.
The theme this year is ‘the personal’. The 2025 AWrI will explore the role of subjectivity and personal perspective in art criticism. In doing so, we will acknowledge and honor that art writing is a means to share who you are as much as what you see.
Burnaway’s Arts Writing Incubator program has equipped participants with tools for pitching, writing statements, and producing considered criticism for the last eight years. The four-week program begins with a session hosted by Burnaway’s editorial masthead and subsequent weeks led by guest speakers. Over the course of the program, students will formally propose, develop, and complete a short-form writing project with one-on-one feedback from Burnaway’s editors. Following the completion of the program, these works will be compiled into a small chapbook circulated on Burnaway’s platform.
The 2025 Art Writing Incubator will be held virtually. Applications are open to anyone over the age of 18 with a connection to our coverage area – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington D.C., West Virginia, and The Caribbean. The Art Writing Incubator intends to foster new writers and champion under-represented voices.
Tuition for the 2025 cycle is $250. Thanks to generous funding from our partners, Burnaway will consider additional needs-based support for selected participants that indicate.
We hosted a Q&A session on May 6.
For program inquiries, please email [email protected].
About the 2025 Art Writing Incubator Speakers
About Brenda Marie Osbey: Poet, essayist, translator, editor, and independent librettist working in English and French, Brenda Marie Osbey is the author of seven books, including “All Souls: Essential Poems” (LSU Press, 2015), “History and Other Poems” (Langston Hughes Award, 2014), and a Kongo-New Orleans opera triptych, including “Sultane au Grand Marais” (Rites & Reason Theatre, 2011).
Edited works include poetry features for War|Scapes, Illuminations, and the 2016 African Poetry Book Series volume “Gabriel Okara: Collected Poems, Edited and with an Introduction by Brenda Marie Osbey” (APBS/University of Nebraska Press). Current editing projects include the Gabriel Okara Reader, comprising the author’s prose and drama. “Léon-Gontran Damas and Guy Tirolien Translated from the French by Brenda Marie Osbey” was published in “Renaissance Noire” (Fall 2018).
Her work has been featured by War|Scapes and The Academy of American Poets, and commissioned by University of Virginia, William & Mary, the Plaine Commune District of France, and the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. Arts and culture essays have appeared in The American Voice; Georgia Review; BrightLeaf; Mondes Francophones; Southern Literary Journal; Creative Nonfiction, and Renaissance Noire.
Recipient of numerous research/writing awards, Osbey was the 2021–22 Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellow. Critical studies of her work include “Summoning Our Saints: the Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey” by John Wharton Lowe (Lexington Books, 2019). Osbey is a New Orleans native.
About Siddhartha Mitter: Siddhartha Mitter is a writer on contemporary art and its social and civic dimensions. He writes in-depth artist profiles, reported features and reviews. He contributes frequently to The New York Times, covering artists and exhibitions across the United States and in Africa and Europe. He has also written for Artforum, Art in America and many others, both within and beyond the art field. Initially trained in the social sciences, Siddhartha has worked in culture journalism for two decades. He received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2017, delivered the AICA-USA Distinguished Critic lecture in 2022 and won a Rabkin Prize for art writing in 2024. He is based in New York City.
About Marsha Pearce: Marsha Pearce is a scholar, educator and independent curator based in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies. Dr. Pearce teaches Visual Arts and serves as Deputy Dean of Distance and Outreach, at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She has worked as the senior editor and art writer for ARC Caribbean Art and Culture Magazine and is a consulting art editor for Moko Caribbean Arts and Letters Magazine. She has also served on the board of the National Museum and Art Gallery of T&T, and as a consultant for the Draft National Policy on Culture and the Arts of T&T. In 2024, she designed and taught a course on art writing for the inaugural Creative Residency Programme hosted by the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago. Her research and critical writings about visual culture have been published in several art catalogues as well as academic journals and books. Her edited book Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean (2023) is an anthology that pairs paintings with short stories to explore sensations of place and identity. Her curatorial projects include a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery London and the British Council for the Americas IN Britain—Caribbean Edition curated online exhibition, and her work with the Peìrez Art Museum Miami to co-curate the group show The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art. During the pandemic, she led a Caribbean artist conversation series titled Quarantine and Art.