Applications for Burnaway’s 2026 Art Writing Incubator are now closed. Applications for the 2027 edition will open next spring.
AWrI 2026 Public Lectures | All times below listed in EST.
Saturday July 11, 12PM-1PM – Marina Reyes Franco – Register
Saturday July 18, 12PM-1PM – Nikky Finney – Register
Saturday July 25, 12PM-1PM – Michelle Millar Fisher – Register
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 ‘Crucial Inquiries, Critical Investigations’. The 2026 Incubator will explore research methods and processes art writers undertake in their work. Whether through personal interrogation, journalistic exploration, or academic study, the incubator will consider how and why areas of interest develop in writing practices.
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 five-week program begins with a session hosted by Burnaway’s editorial masthead and special guests. Subsequent weeks are led by guest culture writers, artists, curators, and thinkers. 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 2026 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.
Meeting dates for the 2026 Art Writing Incubator are Saturdays between June 20th and July 25th (with the exception of July 4).
For program inquiries, please email [email protected].
AWrI 2026 Speakers
Marina Reyes Franco is an independent curator and writer based in Puerto Rico. She was previously the Curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). She received a BA in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.A. in Argentine and Latin American Art History at IDAES-UNSAM in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2010, she co-founded La Ene, an itinerant museum and collection. Projects at MAC include MAR ADENTRO, Sunlight on the Sea Floor (an ICI traveling exhibition co-curated with Paula Naughton), Puerto Rico Negrx (co-curated with María Elena Ortiz), Liberar la luz (Liberating Light), Foreign in a Domestic Sense, and Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime (in collaboration with Americas Society) and El momento del yagrumo, as well as artistic commissions by Daniel Lind Ramos, Sofía Córdova, Tony Cruz Pabón, Julianny Ariza, Ulrik López Medel, and Eliazar Ortiz Roa. As an independent curator, she developed Resisting Paradise, at Publica, San Juan and Fonderie Darling, Montreal; Watch your step / Mind your head, ifa-Galerie Berlin; The 2nd Grand Tropical Biennial in Loiza, Puerto Rico; Caliban, MAC in San Juan; C32: Sucursal, MALBA in Buenos Aires, and numerous exhibitions at La Ene. As curator and researcher, she is dedicated to creating exhibitions and leading collaborative projects that establish aesthetic relations between artists, history, and culture, often highlighting underrepresented histories. She has focused on the work of Esteban Valdés, artistic and literary manifestations on the frontier of political action, and the impact of tourism in cultural production in the Caribbean. She is an alumna of ICI’s Curatorial Intensive and the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Renowned poet and professor Nikky Finney has spent her career illuminating the Southern cultural and political heritage of Black people in ways that resonate throughout the country and world. Her ongoing legacy of poignant expression, indomitable truth, and devotion to social justice has enriched the country and world.
Finney’s love of writing and poetry began during her childhood in South Carolina. Born in Conway, SC. She is the daughter of Ernest A. Finney, Jr. and Frances Davenport Finney. She began taking notes on the world when she was just a girl growing up in South Carolina. She further heeded this calling by earning her bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Talladega College in 1979. The influence of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, and her parents’ social activism led her to pursue additional education in African American Studies at Atlanta University. In her career of more than 30 years, Finney has written six books and hundreds of poems and essays that explore and confront the experiences that have shaped life in the South for herself and countless other African Americans. Her most recent book, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020) is an enduring love song to her father and 400 years of African American fight and ingenuity.
Finney’s work has attracted awards from organizations across the country, including the PEN American Open Book Award in 1999 and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry in 2004; the GCLS Literary Award in 2012; several awards from the Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Foundation for Women; the Aiken-Taylor Award from the Sewanee Review and the University of the South; the Wallace Stevens Award, given annually by the Academy of American Poets to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, and most famously, the National Book Award for Poetry for her 2011 book Head Off & Split.
She is presently a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the University of South Carolina, she holds the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Literature and a Carolina Distinguished Professorship. She has recently been appointed the Executive Director of the newly launched Ernest A. Finney, Jr. Cultural Arts Center in Columbia, a 21st century arts and cultural center named for her father, an exciting endeavor deeply planted in the twin soils of creativity and Black cultural expression.
Dr. Michelle Millar Fisher is the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Previously, she worked at The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on “Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit” which took her on a train journey across all 48 contiguous US states. She collaborates with an independent team on a project called “Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births.” She holds an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and received an M.Phil and PhD from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She publishes widely on art, design, and architecture.
(Register button below leads to application).