Disclaimer: Listings reflect client inquiries verbatim for accuracy and clarity.
In our 2024/2025 season
Target Margin invites applications for our next group of Institute Fellows.
What Is the TMT Institute?
The TMT Institute is a cohort of artists who seek to radically disrupt and re-examine their existing practice without any goal or expected result.
Each Fellow’s journey is individual. Fellows create their own course as they reinvent, question, and challenge their artistic practice. TMT supports fellows with space, material resources and a $2,000 stipend.
The Institute gathers for three short intensive sessions to help each Fellow advance this process. In between intensive meetings, we meet monthly for breakfast and go on occasional excursions to keep our conversation growing.
After the second intensive, each Fellow is encouraged to define and commit to an exploration that they can pursue outside of group gatherings. Target Margin supports these experiments with resources: space, collaborators, materials, etc. Fellows share their progress and evolution through the duration of the Institute. At the end of the season, TMT hosts an “Open Studio” to invite our community of artists and neighbors to share in what we have been exploring. This is not a performance; it can be a conversation, notes, a demonstration, or simply the Fellow’s presence to discuss their work with anyone interested.
The purpose of The TMT Institute is pure experimentation, with no product-oriented end goal.
The Institute intentionally rejects product-oriented work; Fellows pursue no project, no developmental stage, no result of any kind. Our goal is to create a place where artists set aside their assumptions about creating art and disrupt their established practice. Artists try new ways of working, new disciplines to explore, and new aesthetic goals and principles. We value directionless exploration; we consider misfires, dead ends, and bad ideas to be a fruitful and joyous part of our work.
Who Can Apply?
The Institute is open to artists from any artistic discipline within or outside of theater, and is also open to production, technical, and administrative workers in the arts. Fellows must have an established, existing practice in the arts which they are committed to changing.
Selection Process
Interested candidates should send a completed application (see Practical Steps for Applicantsbelow) to Target Margin by Friday, August 9th. Members of TMT’s staff and artistic community will review applications and will invite a handful of folks for an interview to talk more about their artistic practice and interest in the Institute. We will announce new Fellows in early October.
Calendar Requirements
Fellows must be available in person for the following dates in Brooklyn NY:
- Intensive Sessions at Target Margin Theater
- November 7, 8, 9, 10: all day with some evening hours
- February 7, 8, 9: all day with some evening hours
- April 25, 26, 27: all day with some evening hours
- On the first Monday of the month Fellows meet for breakfast at Junior’s in Brooklyn to share thoughts, questions, and experience. Our first breakfast will be Monday November 4th.
- From time to time, we organize excursions to performances, artistic, or other cultural events to feed our thinking.
As the year proceeds, Fellows schedule their own explorations or experiments which Target Margin will support.
Please note that while we meet to share ideas, each Fellow follows their own path of experimentation.
In June 2025 an open studio weekend will share Fellows’ explorations with our artistic community, our Sunset Park neighbors, and the general public. Fellows may describe, discuss or demonstrate their explorations in whatever way suits their work. But this should not be in the form of an audience-attended, time-bounded show.
Tips for Applicants
Please do not apply to the Institute with a project. This is not a project development workshop. There is no public deliverable or timeline to meet.
Appropriate candidates have already created a body of work in their field. The Institute is for artists with an established practice to set that aside and launch in new directions: directors may become installation artists; performers might work with design; producers can pursue ceramics. We aspire to abandon received assumptions about theater, so individuals can create new ways of working from the ground up.
If you recently emerged from a training program, it is likely you will not be an appropriate candidate for this fellowship. This fellowship is not designed to advance your existing practice. There is no formal education level or degree required for this program.
Practical Steps for Applicants
To submit an application, please fill out this google form: https://forms.gle/9qcQyGRk4vZxKvTe7 by Friday, August 9th 11:59pm EST with the following information:
- Your CV or Bio or both or neither; use whatever tells us your background, education and experience.
- Something about your work. This can be a link to pictures, text, videos, recordings, verbal descriptions, actual objects (which you would have to send to our address). Please do not include reviews or features in the press. Let us know if you have live work to be viewed currently; we want to be there if we can.
- Brief (one paragraph) Responses to the following Questions:
-
- What has your artistic practice been up to this point?
- We seek Fellows who are at a moment in their trajectory that is unique and demands change. Why is this the right time for you to radically disrupt and change your practice? How are you at such a moment?
- The Institute is about new thinking. What are some questions about your creative process that you would bring in to ask on the first day of the Institute? What are new directions you could go in? These could be about your own work, about making work generally, about other’s work, or anything in the universe that might shape your work in new ways. Note: these are not ideas you have to commit to for the coming Fellowship year; we just want your thinking and possibilities at this moment.
- Tell us about an artistic experience that has been important to you that is completely unrelated to your own practice or creative products.
- Tell us a surprising thing you have noticed in the last week.
- Anything else you want us to know, other information, thoughts, or questions.