Fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination

The Czernecki Educational Foundation established a new fellowship, sponsoring a fully funded place for one artist, writer, or researcher from Central and Eastern Europe at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination (II&I), the interdisciplinary residency housed at Columbia University’s Reid Hall. Each year, the Czernecki-sponsored Fellow will join the Institute's cohort in residence at the historic Reid Hall in Montparnasse, working alongside scholars and artists from around the world for an academic year.

Welcoming its first cohort in 2018, the II&I is one of Columbia’s most distinctive experiments in higher education. Each year it brings together 14 Fellows—half drawn from Columbia’s own faculty, half scholars, writers, and artists from outside the University and outside the United States—to pursue work that crosses disciplinary lines. Fellows are given time, space, and a community built around sustained conversation and "imaginative leaps across boundaries," generating collaborations in film, philosophy, poetry, visual art, and scholarship that rarely take shape inside a single discipline.

Partnering with the II&I extends a mission the Czernecki Educational Foundation has pursued since 2009: sponsoring humanistic and artistic practice in Central and Eastern Europe and fostering international exchange of ideas. The Foundation was established by Andrzej Czernecki—a nuclear physicist, entrepreneur, and former member of the Polish Parliament—in honor of his father, Roman Czernecki, a teacher and educational activist who organized clandestine schooling during the Second World War and later developed an experimental cooperative high school in the small town of Szczekociny. Today the largest privately endowed educational foundation in Poland, it is led by Roman Czernecki’s grandsons: Igor Czernecki and Andrzej Czernecki Jr.

“Alongside our flagship Horyzonty Scholarship Program for secondary-school students from smaller towns and villages, and the other programs we run in support of cultural, civic, and humanistic life, the Foundation has built a growing network of institutional partnerships—with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Upė Foundation and Frieze London, and now the Institute for Ideas and Imagination — that extend our commitment to Central and Eastern European culture onto a global stage.” —Dr. Igor Czernecki, Chair of the Board.

The Czernecki Educational Foundation Fellowship is open to artists, writers, and researchers originating from Central and Eastern Europe. The selected Fellow receives a full year in residence at Reid Hall, housing, a stipend, and full integration into the Institute’s community—a rare chance to pursue ambitious, cross-disciplinary work in dialogue with some of today’s most original thinkers and artists. The inaugural Czernecki Educational Foundation Fellow for 2026–27 is Tako Robakidze, a documentary photographer from Tbilisi, Georgia, who will join the Institute in Paris this September to develop her project Peacekeepers—a multi-sensory installation and book examining life along Georgia’s shifting borders under Russian occupation.

Applications open annually, with the current cycle closing September 30. Full eligibility guidelines and the application portal are available through the Institute for Ideas and Imagination’s website.