Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellowship 2025 – Apply by October 15
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is now accepting applications for its 2025 fellowship program, with an October 15 deadline.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is throwing open the doors to its most coveted fellowship program, and the clock is already ticking. Applications are due October 15, 2025, for what is widely considered the most prestigious residency in the study of American art.
For scholars chasing the stories buried in paint, bronze, paper, or digital pixels, this program is a lifeline. Graduate students, predoctoral researchers, postdocs, and senior scholars will be able to embed themselves in the Smithsonian’s vast archives and collections—over 46,500 works spanning centuries. The stipends are significant: $10,000 for 10-week student fellows, up to $57,000 for postdoctoral and senior researchers, plus allowances for travel and research.
The scope is staggering. Named fellowships honor legends—Barnet, Corn, Frankenthaler, Frost, Truettner—and fuel work that crosses American modernism, sculpture, craft, Indigenous art, and more. One-year residencies can stretch into transformative careers. Shorter, surgical fellowships like the Audrey Flack offer scholars a month of concentrated access when life makes longer stays impossible.
The fellowship isn’t just about time in the stacks. It’s seminars, public talks, cross-pollination with the National Portrait Gallery, the Archives of American Art, and even the Library of Congress a few blocks away. For Native art scholars, the Betsy James Wyeth Fellowship stands as a pointed commitment to center Indigenous knowledge and methodologies.
This program is not a side note—it is the oldest and largest fellowship for American art scholarship in the world. For those who win a spot, it’s Washington, D.C. in the thick of it: mornings in the Luce Foundation Center, afternoons poring over archives, evenings debating history and craft with peers across disciplines.
The door shuts fast. October 15 is the deadline. The next wave of voices shaping the history of American art will be chosen from this pool.
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