Moonlight Bay Residency Program
Moonlight Bay is Siebel Center for Design's dedicated short-term residency space that visiting artists can take over and make their own. We offer residencies ranging from 2 days to 8 weeks, providing you with a unique opportunity to make Moonlight Bay your own.
Rather than just giving you a room, we want to know what you're making and why. While you focus on your craft, we'll help promote it, connect you with people who should know about it, and make sure your time here can leave a lasting impact. Whether you're building an immersive installation, developing a body of work, running a pop-up brand experience, or deep in a creative sprint, this is a place where focused, committed energy finds a home.
Explore what grief and spectacle reveal about Black creative life with our newest resident, Harmony Holiday
Join us September 23 to welcome the inaugural Arts+ Resident to Moonlight Bay!
Just need a room for a meeting or event?
Moonlight Bay is not your average event space. When you take up residence in Moonlight Bay, you're provided with assistance in promoting your work, on-call support, and community connections to further enrich your time here. With that in mind, we reserve this space solely for those looking to show up with intention and share their work while they're here.
For all other events, please view our bookable spaces at the link below.
What We're Looking For
Our guiding question is pretty simple: Would this be something interesting to encounter if you were walking through the building?
Moonlight Bay residencies don't need to be about design, but they should feel like they belong in a place that gets excited about creativity, human experience, and ideas that matter. Here are some of the things that have defined the residencies we're most proud of:
A clear intention. You have a project and know what you're going to do with the space. You might not have every answer yet, but you can tell us what you're chasing.
An experience, not just a workspace. The best residencies here have been ones that pull people into the conversation. This is a building full of curious people, and we love when residents take advantage of that.
A human dimension. There's a person (or many people) somewhere in what you're making. Think: a craft, memory, play, story, criticism, celebration that connects to people, community, or culture.
Real commitment. We want to build a program where a Moonlight Bay residency means something, and that starts with applicants who are prepared to see things through.
Residency Types
We offer three formats, depending on what your project needs:
Great for visiting practitioners, focused sprints, intensive workshops, or short-window activations. Lighter community engagement requirement—a brief talk, open work session, or informal walk through works well.
Room to develop, build, and share something. Comes with the expectation of at least one community-facing moment during your stay.
For longer-arc projects that benefit from a sustained presence. These are more selective; we'll want a stronger plan for what engagement and documentation looks like over time.
Jameel Bridgewater
Artist Residency · 4 Weeks
Community & Identity · Archival Research · Installation
Standard Residency
Chicago-based artist Jameel Bridgewater transformed Moonlight Bay into a living archive and gathering space — part front porch, part family museum, part portrait studio. Drawing on the University's archives and his own family history, Jameel's installation explored the multi-generational experience of Black students at Illinois, from his grandmother's 1937 graduation to students on campus today. He invited DJs, drew crowds, photographed every Black student who came through, and created a space that felt like it belonged to the community as much as it did to him.
American Advertising Federation (AAF)
RSO Residency · 1-2 Weeks
RSO · Advertising & Branding · Immersive Experience
Standard Residency
AAF Build-It Agency Pop-Up Brand Experience
AAF at Illinois' student advertising agency uses Moonlight Bay each spring to build an immersive pop-up experience around a brand they've developed from the ground up, exploring the connection to experience design and to the idea that a brand is something felt, not just seen. The space becomes a fully realized brand world where visitors walk into something designed, considered, and surprising. It's a showcase of student work that invites the whole building to participate in what they've made.
Ruth West
Visiting Researcher Residency · 1 Week
VR Installation · Art & Science · Data Visualization
Micro Residency
INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night
Ruth West, director of the xREZ Art + Science Lab at University of North Texas, brought her multiplayer VR installation to Moonlight Bay for a week-long residency. INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night turns 160,000-year-old starlight captured by telescopes at the South Pole into a collaborative sound and light performance — where players appear as trails of light and compose music together with their movements. Ruth gave a public lecture on designing VR experiences for everyone in the room, followed by a public installation experience open to all attendees.
Sponsored by the NEA, the UI iSchool, and the IMMERSE Center.
Varying Groups
Experiential Design · Varies
Immersive Design · Experience Design · Game Design
Micro or Standard Residency
Escape Rooms & Immersive Experiences
Moonlight Bay has also hosted a number of escape rooms and similar immersive experience design projects where the entire room is the medium. These have ranged from fully realized puzzle environments to narrative-driven spaces that draw visitors in and ask them to interact.
Who Can Apply
| Faculty & Researchers | Creative projects, research in progress, interdisciplinary experiments, course-connected studios |
| Graduate & Undergraduate Students | Independent or supervised projects with real substance and a clear timeline |
| RSOs (Registered Student Organizations) | Student groups that have a project, showcase, experience, or activation that would thrive in a dedicated space are especially encouraged to apply |
| External Artists & Practitioners | Artists, designers, educators, researchers with a connection to the university or to the community here |
| Community Partners & Organizations | Non-profits, civic groups, and community-based orgs doing work that resonates with SCD's values |
|
Staff & Program Teams |
SCD-adjacent projects, programming ideas, or community-facing work that needs dedicated space and support |
Ready to Apply?
- We recommend applying 4–6 weeks before your desired start date. Earlier is better!
- We run residencies across Fall, Spring, and Summer terms.
- All accepted residencies need a confirmed start date and plan.
- Multiple residencies from the same applicant within a year require extra context.
Harmony Holiday
External Artists & Practitioners · 6 Weeks
Writing · Film · Archival Research
September 21 to October 31, 2026 · Welcoming Reception: Wednesday, September 23, 5-7pm in the Main Lobby · RSVP
Harmony Holiday is the inaugural Arts+ Resident with the Office for Arts Integration, and this fall she's making Moonlight Bay her home base. A writer, dancer, filmmaker, and archivist based in Los Angeles, Harmony works at the intersection of poetry, performance, and the archive, circling a single question across every project: what happens to a person once they become a song, a piece of ephemera, or a silence?
Her central project during the residency is a biography of jazz singer and actress Abbey Lincoln, forthcoming from Yale University Press. Born in Chicago in 1930, Lincoln keeps this research close to home, and Harmony's time on campus will include work with archival collections and conversations with scholars and practitioners across disciplines. Alongside the biography, she's developing a documentary on artist and musician Lonnie Holley that examines celebrity culture and the machinery behind it, a memoir tracing her father's path from Mississippi to New Orleans to Los Angeles, and a new collection of poems. She lets the projects talk to each other, asking the same questions about grief, spectacle, and extraction from different angles until new ones emerge.
Over the course of the residency, Harmony will open her process to the campus community through studio visits and works in progress. Stop by Moonlight Bay to see what she's making, and join us on September 23 to give her a warm welcome.
About the Resident: Harmony Holiday is the author of five poetry collections, including Maafa, and the recipient of the 2026 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Her multimodal exhibition Spectacular Brooding, on view at REDCAT in Los Angeles, investigates the spectacles and secrets of Black grief and positions the home and the studio as intimate spaces of Black creative life. Her writing has appeared in venues ranging from Big Data & Society to the New York Times, and she has held visiting fellowships at Duke, Cornell, and Columbia.
Help us celebrate the launch of the Arts+ Residency and give our newest Moonlight Bay resident, Harmony Holiday, a warm welcome!
Want more information on the residency program?
Download the full guide to our Moonlight Bay Residency Program.
or contact Emily Bear at eknigh3@illinois.edu with any questions