Research support at the CNAC for circus artists and researchers of any nationality, on how circus is written, taught and lived
If you're a circus artist with a research question, or a researcher whose subject is circus, the CNAC can back your project in 2027. The CNAC is France's national higher-education circus school, in Châlons-en-Champagne, and it runs a resource and research centre.
Applications close on Tuesday 15 December 2026.
The call works around five themes: how circus pieces are written, circus teaching, arts education and outreach, the health of circus artists, and how young circus artists get into work. Theoretical research and research through creation both count.
Concretely, the CNAC doesn't name a cash amount. The support can be a research or writing residency at its resource centre, help to structure the project and its method, or help to publish. It can also be a partnership or support letter for research already backed by an institution, a lab or a company, or interviews with CNAC students, teachers and staff.
To give you an idea of who gets it: the CNAC supported 12 projects for 2026, after 9 for 2025 and 13 for 2024. Among them, a PhD student from the University of Helsinki works on embodied knowledge in circus teaching, and a PhD student from the University of Strasbourg looks at how circus deals with artists' injuries.
Aline Paintendre and Magali Sizorn, two speakers at the CNAC's 2 November study day on the health of women circus artists, ran projects funded by this call in 2024.
- ·Circus artists, researchers and PhD students, of any nationality.
- ·Alone, as an artist and researcher pair, or as a research group.
- ·PhD projects get priority, and a PhD student can apply again in later years.
- ·In return, you're asked to present the project at a public meeting at the resource centre and to publish the results open access where you can. You also let the CNAC put the work on Circodata, its online circus resource platform.