The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce that the 2025-2026 application for fellowships for pre-docs and post-docs is open. 

Getty Pre- and Postdoctoral Fellowships are intended for emerging researchers to complete work on projects related to the Scholars Program’s annual theme. While in residence, fellows may pursue research projects, complete dissertations, or expand dissertations for publication.

Annual Theme: Repair
For 2025–2026, Getty invites scholars and arts professionals to apply for a residential fellowship on the topic of repair, a theme that bridges time periods, world geographies, and professional practices. Situated between the forces of creation and destruction, the act of repair can be deeply transformative, with the potential to heal, alter, and renew the material environment. Scholars are asked to think critically about repair, questioning interpretive assessments about the ideal state of any object or site, in addition to querying what constitutes damage or whether to repair the ruined or the broken. Beyond such physical interventions, art and sites of commemoration are often mobilized to heal a fractured social fabric. Indeed, art itself may be offered as reparation to address past wrongs or to recuperate loss. The issue of repair has deep bearing for the arts, conceived in the broadest sense, and especially for institutions that aim to preserve and share global cultural heritage.

Guiding Questions:

• Although often considered an ameliorative process, what are the limitations of repair? Which questions or considerations emerge when efforts to repair fail or fall short?
• How might the notion of repair lend itself to transdisciplinary and/or collaborative methods that expand understudied or precarious practices in art history or open onto new forms of understanding between various arenas of knowledge and practice?
• Acts of repair—material, infrastructural, environmental, and social—require intensive efforts on the part of workers in many fields. How do we account for human labor and agency in the act of repair?
• Efforts to repair or rehabilitate art and cultural heritage have catalyzed debate and contention among scholars, conservators, archaeologists, and the public. What can we learn from these discussions?
• How can the concept of repair help us think in new ways about the networked relations between living things and their environments?
• How can the concept of repair be conceptualized in order to make way for new forms and the possibility of radical alteration?

Eligibility
Predoctoral Fellowship applicants must have advanced to candidacy in their doctoral program by the application deadline and should expect to complete their dissertations during the fellowship period.

Applicants who received their doctoral degree within the past 5 years (after September 1, 2021) should apply for a Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Applicants who received a PhD more than 5 years ago (before September 1, 2021) should apply for a Scholar Grant at the Getty Center or Getty Villa.