EFFEA Call#3 closed on 19 March and applications are under review. You can have a look at the timeline of EFFEA here.

EFFEA’s first round of grants supports 142 festivals and 43 artists (individuals, duos, companies, ensembles or groups) from 16 different disciplines and 34 countries. The residencies take place between 1 February and 31 December 2023.

Check the selected residencies of emerging artists.

The second round of EFFEA grants will support 173 festivals and 50 artists (individuals, duos, companies, ensembles or groups) from 36 countries and 14 artistic disciplines. The residency programme runs from 1 September 2023 till 31 August 2024.

Check the selected residencies of emerging artists.

From 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2025

Festivals are often the discoverers of not-yet-known talents, their originality and innovation, as well as their risk-taking endeavours. These festivals serve and define themselves as the guardians and the intermediate springboard for artists in all artistic disciplines. In this way, the European Festivals Fund for emerging artists – EFFEA, an initiative of the European Festivals Association,  gives per year for three years 150 festivals the chance to take 50 emerging artists per year under their wings by offering them the opportunity to increase their presenting and producing opportunities and to make vital industry connections. EFFEA offers festivals an incentive to take the time to find and work with those artists that are not yet in this market but have the talent, the capacity, and the vision to develop an international career.

The Fund will foster and enable European visibility of emerging artists. It will address the needs of artists at different levels (research, capacity building, network, presentation platforms), the needs of festivals (programmers capacity building, alertness, internationalisation, collaboration), and audiences (access to diverse artists and arts works). It will establish a label that ambitions to be a referential instrument for artists and festivals when it comes to co-programming and presentation of emerging artists on festivals stages in Europe.

The Fund is based on fair, inclusive and diverse principles at all its levels (with an embedded pluralism principle in the appointment and selection of the EFFEA jury, festivals, artists, criteria promoting equal opportunities and fair remuneration). It ambitions to become an effective tool to fight imbalances (or increase diversity and pluralism) of programming and accessing arts on Europe’s festivals stages focusing on imbalances between East and West, men and women, black and white, ages and others (the EFFEA Duty of Care Protocol will be a result of this attention).

The activities include approximately 50 residencies for emerging artists in the seat of 50 festivals (including the collaboration of at least two other festivals per project) per year based on an annual call to festivals. The EFFEA Jury will select the festivals and will be responsible to develop and implement the common artistic and editorial selection mechanism for the fund to be balanced, inclusive, sustainable, and diverse. The call is targeted at festivals to present an artist in residence in 2 categories: EFFEA "Discovery" Artist in residence and EFFEA "Springboard" Artist in residence.

14 EFFEA Platform Members all over Europe extend the communication efforts towards the festivals community. FestivalFinder.eu serves as the platform for registration as well as making artists accessible to the wider public. EFFEA is a further development of EFFE: Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe, building on the community of 2450 Festivals with the EFFE Label that registered on FestivalFinder.eu.

EFFEA is an initiative of the European Festivals Association, co-funded by the European Union, implemented in partnership with 14 EFFE Hubs: Croatian Composers Society (Croatia), Culture Matters (Czechia), PLMF Arts Management (Estonia), France Festivals (France), Festival Friends (Germany), Stichting Caucasus Foundation (Georgia), Summa Artium Kultúra Támogató Nonprofit Kft. (Hungary), Association of Irish Festival Events (Ireland), ItaliaFestival (Italy), ARC Research and Consultancy Ltd. (Malta), Asociația Centrul Cultural Clujean (Romania), ArtLink (Serbia), Sweden Festivals (Sweden), Development Centre "Democracy through Culture" (Ukraine).