Movement Residency
Summer 2026
A summer residency built for people who work with/within the body through performance, dance, ritual, and movement.
This residency is generously supported by Prospect Hill
Created for those artists interested in embodying and working with the timescapes, legacies, ruptures, and knowledge of the present moment — in deconstructing and alchemizing one thing into another. This residency also holds a unique opportunity to take creative work off the ground and into the towering redwood trees on the Mendocino Coast.
Finding motion in slowness, listening, prayer, ritual, convening, and communication, this residency is meant for those attuning to spaces of uncertainty and abundance. For those searching for traces of remembrance, for a space to experiment alone or in community with the unique landscapes and waterscapes of Mendocino, whose timelessness and boundlessness are our original movers.
Apply For our Movement Residency at the Mendocino Art Center
For a week of the month-long residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in a week-long workshop with the Mendocino Dance Project. During this time, artists will take their work off the ground and into the towering redwood trees, exploring vertical dance as a meeting point between body, gravity, and landscape.
Through research, improvisation, and collaboration, artists will investigate movement suspended in space, reimagining dance beyond the horizontal plane and engaging the redwoods as both partner and stage. These rare and unique trees are the tallest trees in the world, echoing history, teaching resiliency, and giving us the opportunity to listen to our own bodies and to the land.
Self-Directed Time
After the first week residents are invited to use their remaining three weeks to spontaneously/organically shape their experience. We invite artists to experiment with individual and collaborative processes, find ways of sharing space and work and cultivate independence and interdependence. This is a space to renew connection to self, each other, and creative work. There is no need for a final performance, but the opportunity for showcasing is there if residents wish to show their work.
A Beautiful, Rustic Setting
Studio space will be offered, but we encourage artists to apply who are interested in creating place-based performance, as the Mendocino Arts Center is located on coastal Pomo land near many beaches, coves, redwoods, and open landscapes that invites deep listening, intuiting, and collaboration.
Duration
With this funding, we would be able to provide an opportunity for a month-long performance residency to be free of charge, which will allow for a greater diversity in the applicant pool and a chance for artists who otherwise couldn’t benefit from this opportunity to have the time to remember, intuit, rest, and create in Mendocino.
We particularly encourage Indigenous artists, BIPOC artists, LGBTQIA and two-spirit artists, neurodiverse artists, and artists on the margins to apply for this opportunity. We especially welcome those whose work engages justice, land, lineage, ecology, body, resistance, healing, or collective memory. We would be fortunate to have this funding for artists to freely explore their work from new perspectives, heights, and environmental contexts, and then bring what they find back to their communities. The Mendocino Arts Center is committed to interdependence and reciprocity; this residency is a huge step in the direction of expanding our work past the studio space and into something that intentionally engages with public audience and space.