The Headley Fellowships with Art Fund aim to encourage collections-focused projects by developing and preserving specialist curatorial skills and expertise in regional museums, enabling knowledge to be shared as widely as possible across the sector. Specifically, the programme aims to:

• Give curators the time and resource needed to develop specialist expertise and skills relating to public collections, and to produce ambitious projects with collections at their core.
• Invest in museums and curators across the UK, empowering them to realise exceptional ideas for communicating with a wide range of audiences.
• Facilitate collaboration and an enhanced flow of expertise and skills across the sector by feeding into established mechanisms for knowledge-sharing (such as subject specialist networks).

What we’ll support

We’re looking to support projects from curators that will develop specialist knowledge and expertise, have a significant public outcome for museums, and encourage knowledge sharing across the sector. Projects could:

• Involve research into a part of the collections that a museum may not have the specialist expertise to use effectively, or where that specialist provision has been lost
• Interrogate collections through a critical decolonial lens
• Explore how collections and displays could be more relevant to communities

We can support curators working with any kind of museum collection, from fine art and social history to archaeology and natural history. Applicants should have considerable experience within the sector and are likely to be mid-career.

Funds available

Each fellowship has a value of up to £27,500. A fellowship fee of up to £20,500 will fund a curator’s time for up to six months; this can support backfilling an existing curator’s post, increasing the hours of an existing part-time curator, or employing a freelance curator.

There is additional funding of up to £7,000 available to support:

• Research and professional development including training opportunities, research trips, courses of study and more
• Sector outputs such as workshops, study days, conferences and toolkits
• Public outputs such as on-site or digital exhibitions, redisplays and learning programmes