Artivist-in-Residence Program
Art is a powerful tool for human rights. It allows communication across borders and languages, and challenges harmful narratives while building solidarity. ICAAD’s Artivist-in-Residence program features emerging and underrepresented artists from around the world whose work explores human rights.
The program invites artists whose practice engages with human rights to create new work alongside our legal, design, and advocacy team.
How the Residency Works
Virtual, wherever you are. Residents have worked from India, Aotearoa New Zealand, and New York. There is no relocation and no studio requirement, the engagement is conducted online.
Up to a year to make the work. Most residencies run up to twelve months, from first concept to finished work. Projects that need longer, like film or a multi-part series, can run longer.
Co-created, not commissioned. Residents are trained through the Advocacy Essentials course, and choose the issue they want to work on. Human rights and conceptual input are provided as the project begins. Where the work concerns a specific community, we help the artists make connections and introduce them to partners where we have them.
Curatorial input throughout. Our team works with residents on sequencing, framing, and the words that travel with the work, from early concept through to exhibition.
The Work Keeps Traveling
A residency project has an end date. The relationship does not. We keep working with our artivists long after a project is finished, and the work keeps finding new audiences. In June and July 2026, work by five ICAAD artivists and two Banaban artists was shown in the Main Lobby Gallery of UN Headquarters in New York, with endorsement from UN Women.
What We Provide
- Direct financial support of up to $5,000 toward creating the work
- Human rights training through our Advocacy Academy
- Research assistance from our legal and research team
- Curatorial input from concept through exhibition
- Connections to community partners and subject matter experts
- Marketing, communications, and media support
- Exhibition in galleries, virtual exhibits, film festivals, conferences, and UN settings
How Artists Join
Artists are shortlisted through ICAAD advisory recommendations and partner nominations, and are then invited to submit a proposal. We select three to five artists to take part each time the residency opens.
We are not accepting open applications at this time. If your work engages with human rights and you would like us to know about it, write to info@icaad.ngo.
Meet the Artivists
Six artists have created new work through the residency since 2020, in blackout poetry, painting, photography, illustration, animation, and multi-media installation. Their projects take on the gap between law and justice, colonial mining and the climate crisis, the objects refugees carry with them, identity and bias, and what sustains advocates themselves. We are still working with several of them.
Namita Kulkarni
Yoga Teacher, Writer
Website: www.radicallyeverafter.com | Instagram: @radicallyeverafter
Namita Kulkarni is a yoga teacher, writer and artist based in India. She’s been teaching yoga for the last 12 years. A gold-medallist law graduate, she also has a Post-graduate Diploma in Intellectual property rights from National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
Her Artivist project aims to demonstrate how colonialism has been (and continues to be) the major cause of the climate crisis. Colonialism and the climate crisis both being rooted in ever-extractive ways of life which stand disconnected from any sense of wonder and humility before the infinite workings of the planet. Her project also explores how indigenous wisdom might bring us to our role as a custodial species with a sense of belonging to the planet rather than possessing it.
Work: Colonialism and the Climate Crisis, paintings launched in Bangalore in 2023 and shown at UN Headquarters in 2026.
Dilpreet Bhullar
Writer, Researcher
Instagram: dilpreet_bhullar_026
Dilpreet Bhullar is a writer and researcher based in New Delhi, India. With an MPhil from the University of Delhi in Comparative Literature, she has been the recipient of the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellowship at Columbia University, New York. She is co-editor of the books Third Eye: Photography and Ways of Seeing and Voices and Images. Her essays on identity politics, the representation of refugees in print and digital media, and visual sociology are frequently published in leading books and journals. Currently, she is the associate editor of a theme-based journal dedicated to visual arts, published by India Habitat Centre.
Dilpreet is developing the project entitled Narrative of Object and Voice of Memory. The exercise to retrace the intangible memory entwined with the tangible object is the core of the project. The etic framework of the projects offers displaced the agency to share a figment of personal memory of loss to reconcile with the past in the present with a desire of creating a promising future. Towards this end, the photo-documentation of the object – a source of emotive personal attachment – interweaves the personal histories and experiences of displacement.
Work: A Home in the Constant Flux: A Call to the Verb Memory, launched at the Simurgh Center in New Delhi in 2023, with the cyanotype series shown at UN Headquarters in 2026.
“The exercise to retrace the intangible memory entwined with the tangible object is the core of the project.”
Katja Phutaraksa Neef
Political Artist
Instagram: @art.of.unrest
Twitter: @Katja_Neef
Portfolio: https://revolutioncreative.co.nz/user/1824/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katja-phutaraksa-neef/
Katja Phutaraksa Neef is a self-taught political artist born and raised in Thailand and grew up in Japan and Aotearoa. She has participated in field research and workshops in Fiji, Vanuatu, Thailand, Cambodia, Tanzania, Peru, Indonesia, and West Papua with a regional focus on Asia and the Pacific. Her academic research and advocacy interests include issues concerning land governance and dispossession, social inclusion, Indigenous rights, forced migration, and climate justice.
Katja’s artworks explore key human rights themes surrounding Climate Justice, refugees, forced displacement, and racial justice through ostensibly innocuous mediums such as art, predominantly using mixed media, sculpture, and oil paint.
Work: Justice for Rabi, co-created with Banaban communities, shown at Silo 6 in Auckland in 2023 and at UN Headquarters in 2026.
Queen
Artist, Facilitator & Wellness Practitioner
Website: re:covering (THE REFLECTION SESSIONS)
Queen is an Artist, Facilitator & Wellness Practitioner from the indigenous Munsee Lenape lands called Brooklyn, New York. From music to meditation and more, Queen designs multi-media experiences that integrate visual & performing arts with practical healing techniques. Current work explores reflexivity-centered practice as a critical resource for more mindful and effective activism.
Work: re:covering (The Reflection Sessions), seven digital assemblages shown at UN Headquarters in 2026.
“I believe that Art is Technology –
a ’spiritual device’
… for human(e) connection & transformation …”
Vishavjit Singh
Illustrator, Performance Artist, Storyteller
Website: Sikhtoons
Vishavjit Singh is a New York City based TEDx speaker, illustrator, performance artist, storyteller, and creator of www.Sikhtoons.com. He got his spark for cartooning in the post 9/11 tragedy when Americans with turbaned and bearded countenance became targets of hate/bias crimes. For the past few years, he has been traveling across the US with his Captain America persona armed with a turban, beard, and humor to tackle fear, anxiety, bigotry, and intolerance. He uses storytelling as a tool to create a space for challenging conversations around identity, race, bias, vulnerability, and how to be agents for positive change. He hosts talks & keynotes in schools, universities, government agencies and companies including Google, Apple, NASA & Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. As an artivist and a survivor of the 1984 genocidal massacre of Sikhs in India, he is working to capture the stories of many like himself who survived this tragedy.
Work: American Sikh, a Webby-winning animated short directed by Ryan Westra and co-executive produced by ICAAD, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Harbani Kaur Ahuja
Public Interest Attorney, Writer, Graphic Designer
Instagram: @by.bani
Harbani Kaur Ahuja is a public interest attorney committed to serving marginalized communities, with work spanning civil rights, immigrant rights, and public health. She is Associate Counsel with the Economic Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and was previously Senior Legislative Counsel to the New York City Council. She holds a J.D. with a concentration in Constitutional Law from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and is admitted to practice in New York and New Jersey.
In 2020 Harbani became ICAAD’s first artivist in residence. Dicta combines her love for the law and poetry, unearthing the essence of court decisions to illuminate the broader societal context in which they were written. The series runs across Women’s Rights, the Rights of Black People, Immigrant Rights, and the Right to Love.
Work: Dicta, a Webby-honored blackout poetry series drawn from U.S. Supreme Court decisions, shown at Clifford Chance in New York, at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Los Angeles, and at RightsCon.
Supporting the Program
We appreciate your support, at any level. Investments of $10,000 and up sponsor a new resident artist.