The National Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange (NCACE) was established with support from Research England in 2021. Our mission is to facilitate and support capacity for knowledge exchange between higher education and the arts and cultural sectors, with a particular focus on evidencing and showcasing the social, cultural, environmental as well as economic impacts of such activities.
ABOUT THE AWARDS
NCACE is delighted to announce our new Future Icons of Cultural Knowledge Exchange Awards programme. We will be making up to 5 awards of £1,000 to incentivise and reward brilliant collaborations between researchers and the arts and culture sector. We are delighted to announce that nominations for this exciting new initiative are now open.
Over recent years we have seen an extraordinary range of collaborations between higher education and the arts and culture sectors emerging across the UK. These are partnerships that are imaginative, impactful, community-rooted, socially engaged, and often transformative for all involved. As a champion for academic–cultural collaboration, we are launching the Future Icons of Culture Knowledge Exchange Awards as a new pilot designed to spotlight, strengthen, and celebrate such collaboration.
The programme seeks to:
▪ Recognise and reward emergent, novel, and long-standing collaborations between universities and cultural organisations, including artists, creative practitioners, and smaller cultural actors.
▪ Generate compelling case studies and evidence that demonstrate the distinctive value of arts and humanities knowledge exchange, helping the sector advocate for its impact with clarity and confidence.
▪ Inspire and inform fresh thinking about the value, purpose, and future shape of cultural collaboration, encouraging new models, new relationships, and new forms of visibility for research and creativity.
These awards are being designed to: celebrate and elevate the work already happening across the sector, to champion the people and partnerships driving it, and to help imagine a more ambitious, inclusive, and sustainable future for cultural knowledge exchange.
WHAT THE AWARDS WILL SUPPORT
We aim to support work across five key categories and that connects to several key themes Award Categories
▪ Equitable Partnership Award: Recognising collaborations that demonstrate fair, balanced and mutually beneficial partnership between universities and cultural organisations and or artists/cultural practitioners
▪ Emerging Academic–Cultural Collaboration Award: Celebrating new or pilot collaborations that show innovation and strong future potential.
▪ Cultural Organisation Partner of the Year: Recognising a cultural organisation that has shown exceptional leadership in working with universities and research partners.
▪ Cultural Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year: Awarded to a project that successfully translates academic research into cultural, creative or public outcomes.
▪ Transformative Impact Through Cultural Knowledge Exchange Award: Recognising collaborations that create meaningful social, environmental, educational or economic impact(s) through arts, culture or humanities research.
THEMES
We are interested in supporting work that broadly thematically links to one or more of the following areas:
▪ People and places: Building cultural partnerships
▪ Creative Practices in Science, Climate, Health & Social Change
▪ Developing innovative approaches to Cultural Knowledge Exchange
▪ Digital tools, technologies and AI in Cultural Knowledge Exchange
▪ Championing Social Justice through Co-Production and Creative Practice
We are also open to nominations from areas that are not well captured in the themes above. This is a pilot scheme so it may be that we award more than one award in any one category, depending on our nominations.
For full details of the scheme, click here; the nomination form is available here. Nominations must be submitted to Noshin Sultan at noshin.sultan@sas.ac.uk by 4 June 2026.