Last year, we invited two of our Residents, Lucy Turner and Imwen Eke, to do some research into governance models for the Studio. Together with a wider group including Studio staff and university partners, they’ve been helping us think through questions of agency, representation, accountability and culture. You can read a report from Lucy here.

For the past few months we’ve been thinking about their findings, and how we can give Residents more voice in the Studio’s decision-making, while respecting that not everybody wants to get involved in complex governance processes, and the economic reality that many of our Residents aren’t able to commit unpaid time to the running of the Studio. We’ll be rolling out a few changes over the next few months.

The first of these changes is a group we’re calling Resident Advisors (no relation), who will be involved in the running of the Studio on both the strategic and practical levels. Every six months, we will randomly select six Residents who will be paid (£400 each) for:

  • Three regular advisory meetings, where the group will meet with the Studio team to discuss questions about the future direction of the Studio
  • About a day’s work each, serving on interview panels and reviewing applications for funding, helping to make decisions about new Residents, staff, and funded projects

Participation can be online or in-person, and is entirely optional — we understand that even with payment for their time, not everyone has the capacity or interest in investing time in this kind of work. We ask that all Residents actively participate in the life of the Studio — this takes different forms for different people, but we hope that being a Resident Advisor can be a way for some Residents to do this. We also ask that those selected reflect on their own positionality within the Studio, and recuse themselves if they feel they already have decision-making power, such as through a leadership position in large funded projects.

We’ll be contacting the first group of Resident Advisors shortly, and once they’ve confirmed we’ll let everyone know who is taking part. We plan to run this system as a trial for the first eighteen months, i.e. three cycles of Advisors, and then make any changes we need going forward.

Our hope is that this system will give Residents more of a view into how decisions are made in the Studio, and provide an avenue for a wider range of voices to feed into those decisions.