Your stories wanted for new Online Creative Residency

Every year, the Europeana Initiative runs a Digital Storytelling Festival. This international event encourages cultural heritage professionals, educators, creatives, and students from Europe and beyond to boost their storytelling skills and tell stories exploring culture. Our Online Creative Residency is now a key part of the festival.

The residency brings students and new professionals who want to gain storytelling skills in a professional setting together with experts in a range of formats. Last year, participants explored stories in writing, social media and animation, and this year, we’re introducing two new formats - collage art and storytelling with 3D - and we’re looking for creative, enthusiastic and committed participants to join us!

Stories from last year’s residency

In 2023, residency participants worked with specialist mentors to produce writing, social media posts and animations celebrating queer stories, narratives and cultural heritage from all around Europe. All their stories were added to our LGBTQ+ page.

This was an opportunity to have their work published, as well as a chance to explore queer culture. For some, it was a way to feel accepted within that culture. One participant, Aida Naasan Agha Spyridopoulou, told us that, ‘Being part of the queer narrative through a creative process made me feel part of queer culture, and doing so made me feel more comfortable with my queer identity and my sexuality. In the end, feeling you have a queer heritage is very important.’

This year's theme

Our theme this year is ‘Journey’. That might bring up thoughts of travel, holidays, or the juxtaposition of destination and home. It might lead to personal or reflective journeys, or maybe invoke stories about journeys taken using various modes of transport, and the interesting people met along the way. Will we see famous historical journeys reflected in our residency stories? Or find out about solo adventurers or group migrations? Residency stories might be factual, fictional, personal or political - we can’t wait to find out!

A special 3D resource

Residency participants will use the openly licensed material available on the Europeana website to illustrate or inspire their creations in all the format categories.

This year, we have a new set of 3D items that we would love participants to explore. This set of 3D items comes from a campaign called Twin it!, in which every European Union member state is digitising one or more cultural heritage items (buildings, statues, objects) and making them available on the Europeana website. We hope that these will be available from March onwards to be included in the residency.

Mentors

This year, we have six mentors! Beth Daley (writing), Carola Carlino and Marianna Marcucci (social media) and Nick Cave (animation) are returning, having enjoyed the residency so much last year. And they are joined by Cosmina Berta (collage art) and one more mentor (details to come soon) who will lead our storytelling in 3D strand.

Cosmina says, ‘I am thrilled about the opportunity to take part in the upcoming residency and mentor the collage art group! Collaborating with the participants and guiding them through workshops is a chance to share my passion for collage art using Europeana material and hopefully inspire their creative journeys. Our time together is an exciting prospect that resonates with my dedication for creative discovery and self-expression.’

Online info session - 21 February 2024

In this event, we'll showcase last year's Creative Online Residency, have some creative fun together and tell you everything you need to know about the application process for this year.

We hope you'll join us, although please note, everyone can apply for the residency - so don't worry if you can't make it to the info session. A recording will be made available of this session after the event.