This opportunity is open to artists working in all media, including drawing, ceramics, film and video, installation, painting, performance, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and textiles, among others.

The Great Rivers Biennial is open to artists living in the following counties in Missouri and Illinois:

• Missouri: St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Jefferson County, or St. Charles County.
• Illinois: St. Clair County or Madison County.

Artists must have been resident in one of these counties for a minimum of one year prior to application (since June 1, 2024 or earlier).

Artists must continue to reside in this region throughout the designated planning, production, and exhibition period (August 2025 through February 2027).

• Applicants must be 18 years of age or older.
• Previous recipients of a Great Rivers Biennial award are ineligible. 
• Artists enrolled in graduate or post-graduate programs in the St. Louis Metropolitan Region are eligible if they meet the residency requirements above. Undergraduate and high school students are not eligible. 
• Artist collectives (2 or more artists) are eligible, provided no member is a previous Great Rivers Biennial award recipient. Applications should note all collective members. If an award is offered, it will be divided equally among members.
• Semi-finalists must be available for an in-person studio visit with the jurors in late July or early August 2025, between 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM. If the artist does not have a studio, an alternative space may be arranged. Ten semi-finalists will be selected for these visits, which cannot be conducted via phone or video.

Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Leslie Hewitt addresses fluid notions of time. Oscillating between the illusionary potential of photography and the physical weight of sculpture, her compositions suggest the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical lives.

A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Artists Space in New York; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA > < ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.

Margot Norton is Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where she leads the curatorial team and oversees the exhibition program. At BAMPFA she curated and co-curated MATRIX 283/ Gabriel Chaile (2023); MATRIX 286/Amol K. Patil (through April 2025); To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection (through July 2025); and the BAMPFA presentation of Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection (through April 2025). Norton was previously Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where she curated over forty exhibitions including recent solo shows with Carmen Argote, Diedrick Brackens, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Wangechi Mutu, Pepón Osorio, Mika Rottenberg, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, and the 2021 New Museum Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone. In 2017, she curated the Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E. She regularly contributes to exhibition catalogues and publications and is also co-founder and current editorial council member of Museums Moving Forward, an independent, limited-life organization devoted to envisioning and creating a more just museum sector by 2030. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York.

Pavel Pyś is the Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy at the Walker Art Center. At the Walker, he has curated solo exhibitions by Daniel Buren, Paul Chan, Pan Daijing, Michaela Eichwald, Christine Sun Kim, Carolyn Lazard, Ralph Lemon & Kevin Beasley, Sarah Michelson, and Elizabeth Price, as well as the group exhibition The Body Electric (2019). In 2018, he was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship which aided research towards Multiple Realities: Experimental Art from the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-80s, presented at the Walker, Phoenix Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery. Pyś is closely involved in leading the strategic vision, development, and long-range planning of the Walker’s collection. In 2025, he was awarded a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship.

Between 2011 and 2015, he was the Exhibitions & Displays Curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo curatorial residency. He has published essays on artists including Trisha Baga, Carol Bove, Michael Dean, John Latham, Wilhelm Sasnal, Alina Szapocznikow, and Hague Yang. Pyś received an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College in 2010 and an MSc in Culture & Society from the London School of Economics in 2009.