Announcing the 2020 Adobe Creative Residents and Community Fund

One of my favorite programs at Adobe has been the Adobe Creative Residency. We introduced this program five years ago with the goal to offer creative professionals starting their career the ability to experiment and pursue a creative project for an entire year. Since we launched the program it has grown from two residents in the first year to nine in the past year and expanded into new countries including Germany, England, and Japan. Interest in this program continues to grow with an incredible number of people applying each year and requests to expand into new countries.

This year, in response to the extensive need in the creative community for support due to COVID-19, we’ve decided to restructure the program to benefit many more people. We will have just two Creative Residents this year – but in addition to welcoming our new class of Creative Residents, we are excited to announce a $1 million Creative Residency Community Fund that will enable us to support many more creators with funding for their personal projects and hiring them for Adobe-commissioned projects over the next year.

The fund will be open worldwide and in addition to the payment, recipients of both the personal projects and commissioned projects will get additional support from Adobe including a Creative Cloud membership and career guidance workshops. Applications for the Creative Residency Community Fund are open now. I encourage you to apply today.

While we’re excited to kick off the Community Fund, I also wanted to announce our two new Creative Residents for 2020-2021, who will be focusing on photography and user experience design. Maddy Beard and Christina Poku are doing amazing things in their respective fields and, I am excited to share their work and passion with you.

Maddy Beard is exploring the use of interaction design to promote mindfulness in daily life in a time when people are increasingly reliant on technology. She’s partnering with brands to design experiences that help people use tech as a tool rather than a crutch. She’s sharing her designs, processes, findings, and own day-to-day life through photos, videos, articles, and interactive challenges.

Christina Poku is investigating the idea of technology as abundance. She’s using photography, GIFs, and set design to make staged scenes that explore how technology can create growth, build community, and change barriers to access. She’s sharing her journey with fellow creatives via Instagram, TikTok, and more.

Welcome to Maddy and Christina! We’re excited to see all you accomplish in the next year.

We know that these are challenging times in the creative community, and we want to support as many creatives as possible through the new Community Fund and our other programs and resources.

I also want to thank the Adobe Creative Cloud Community team for being agile in their thinking in how we evolve the program to benefit more of creators.