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NEST Graduate Student Summer Fellowships, in Partnership with SPIKE

We are currently seeking applications for Summer 2026 Fellows!

NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts is partnering with the newly formed SPIKE Center for Sustainability Education to share a call for summer fellows to work on collaborative projects bridging the arts and sciences, with a focus of several fellowships on sustainability.

Since 2017, NEST has supported over 80 graduate students, facilitating art-science exhibitions across the state, featuring new research that has manifested in film, sculpture, music, painting, video, virtual reality, and all manner of live performance, including poetry, theater, and dance. Projects have been presented at scientific conferences, in science journals, and yielded quantitative data in multiple dissertations.  In 2026, NEST joins forces with SPIKE to engage more students and to think creatively about sustainability in cross-disciplinary work at CU Boulder.

CU Boulder is home to some of the top arts, earth, and space science graduate programs in the country, as well as being a leader in sustainability. The NEST and SPIKE Graduate Student Summer Fellowships are intended to explore the interrelation, generative overlaps, and productive differences between arts-based and science-based disciplines.

General Requirements

The central requirements for these graduate fellowships are (1) creating cross-disciplinary pairs—or small teams—of graduate collaborators to (2) welcome and mentor an undergraduate student who will work on a media project alongside the team, (3) result in a broadly-defined media project for public exhibition on campus, and (4) where the implementation of the sustainability practice explored should be considered in the final product. Example projects may include: public installations, performances, time-based or moving-image based works, sonic or audio compositions, or any other arts forms that would be within practice-based research. Undergraduate mentees can be identified by the applicants, or - after acceptance - with the assistance of NEST/ SPIKE.

Each graduate team will be supported with up to $10,000 total. Each undergraduate fellow will receive an additional $1,000 stipend from NEST. This fellowship is generally intended for pairs of CU Boulder graduate students creating original research and/or creative work projects in collaboration—with one fellow in the arts and humanities, and one in the sciences; both broadly defined. However, if you are interested in having additional collaborators, we ask you to contact NEST before applying. We expect grantees will submit an exhibition-ready or publication-ready project on or by the end of Fall 2026—some flexibility is possible.

Proposal Requirements

Proposals should be a maximum of two pages and include: names and departments of collaborators, a project overview, a summary of research questions and intended project outcomes, and an implementation plan. An initial budget is also requested and may be submitted as an extra page. Proposals will be evaluated based on the overall vision of the project, the depth of disciplinary methods engaged, and the feasibility for this project to be completed by or in Fall 2026. Be sure to also address how you envision a public-facing component for the final work—e.g., workshop, performance, exhibition, special event, panel, screening, poster presentation, etc. Finally, make sure you take into account current campus, county, state, and federal safety guidelines.

Eligibility

Students must be currently enrolled as full or part-time graduate students at CU Boulder. Doctoral students and Master’s students are all encouraged to apply. Questions should be directed to nest@colorado.edu.

Deadline

Deadline for proposals is March 23^rd, 2026. Send proposals to nest@colorado.edu with the subject line: Summer Graduate Fellowship Application.