Opportunities Without Fees
Opportunities that cost nothing to apply to. No submission fee, no entry fee, no reading fee — filtered and checked.
206 open listings · Updated 25 October 2026
Why entry fees exist, and when they are reasonable
Fees are not inherently predatory. Jurying takes time, exhibitions cost money to install, and a small charge filters out volume submissions. A modest fee from an organisation that names its jury, states what selected artists receive and publishes who it has shown before is buying you a real assessment.
The problem is the other kind: a substantial fee for inclusion in a listing with no selection, no named panel and no record of past participants. At that point the fee is the product. Filtering to fee-free opportunities removes that question entirely. If nothing is being charged, nothing is being sold to you.
What fee-free usually signals
Opportunities with no submission fee tend to come from publicly funded institutions, museums, universities, artist-run spaces and foundations with an endowment. They are funded to run the programme rather than to recover costs from applicants, which usually means the selection is editorial rather than commercial.
It is not a guarantee of quality, a free call can still be poorly run, but it does remove the most common conflict of interest, where an organiser benefits from receiving applications regardless of what happens to them.
Applying well when there is no cost to apply
Because free opportunities cost nothing, they attract high volumes, and selection is often tighter than for paid ones. The absence of a fee should change what you apply to, not how carefully you apply.
Keep a current set of documentation ready, images with captions, a CV, a short statement, so that applying is a matter of selection rather than production. The strongest applications are almost never the ones assembled the night before a deadline.
