The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce that the 2025-2026 application for residential grants is open. 

The Getty Scholars Program supports innovative research about art, conceived in the broadest terms, and its histories, by providing a locus for international scholars to forge collaborations across disciplines and professional practices, while also developing new audiences for their work. During their residency, the scholar cohort is immersed in a vibrant local community devoted to the advancement of knowledge and hosted at an institution committed to preserving, understanding, interpreting, and sharing its vast library and collections. 

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
Scholar Grant applicants should have received a PhD more than 5 years ago (before September 1, 2021). Applicants from associated fields who do not hold a PhD but have commensurate professional experience will also be considered.

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