Our 2025 Innovator in Residence is Seattle-based artist and developer Vivian Li and her project "Anywhere Adventures".
Next application period
The next Broad Agency Announcement is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2026, with the Residency beginning in September 2026. Subscribe to the Signal Blog for updates or check back on this page. You can review the Broad Agency Announcement posted in January 2024 for the previous award cycle on SAM.gov.
About the Residency
The Library of Congress expects to issue a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to fund an individual to do research with Library of Congress collections, produce a creative and transformative digital work for the American people, and serve as an ambassador for the Library. The residency is anticipated to be mostly remote, with some in-person research and event requirements, beginning in September 2026. The residency will be no less than 12 months and no more than 24 months. Applicants will propose their own schedule for the residency as part of the application process. The second year of the residency is optional, pending Library approval and available funding. Proposed budgets should not exceed $90,000 for the first year and $90,000 for the optional second year. The Labs team will seek proposals for research and work that connects Library collections to new audiences by promoting insight and inspiration, discovery of Library items, and/or creative remixing and reuse. The selected resident will have access to both publicly available and on-site only Library collections and will be given program and research support. The work(s) will be displayed on the Library’s websites and/or in public spaces at the discretion of the Library.
Current Innovator in Residence
Artist, developer and 2025 Innovator in Residence Vivian Li created a mobile website for audiences around the country to learn about their hometowns through items from the Library’s digital collections. Full historical photos, maps, newspaper articles and other Library materials, the mobile website, designed to be viewed on a phone, offers self-guided tours of locations across each of the selected cities.
Past Innovators
- 2022 Jeffrey Yoo Warren digitally reconstructed historic Chinatowns with 3D and virtual reality technologies as part of Seeing Lost Enclaves: Relational Reconstructions of Erased Historic Neighborhoods of Color. Yoo Warren published a toolkit to share his methodology.
- 2021 Courtney McClellan - designed and curated Speculative Annotation, a dynamic website presenting items from the Library’s collections for students and teachers to have conversations with history through annotation.
- 2020 Brian Foo - created the application Citizen Dj to enable the public to discover and create from LC free to use sound collections. Brian's concept paper is available at [baa link] for applicants to see.
- 2020 Benjamin Charles Germain Lee - created a way for users to explore visual content from historic newspapers in the Chronicling America collection using machine learning.
- 2018 Jer Thorp - applied the idea of serendipity to the scale of LC collections through the podcast "Artist in the Archive" and a suite of applications