Culture scholarships
Culture scholarships
Every year, the Sten A Olsson Foundation awards culture scholarships in several artistic disciplines such as performing arts - music, dance, theatre, circus - visual arts, literature and film.
Culture scholarships 2025
Phax
Ahamada
Street dance, mime, physical theatre, educational projects and collaborations across the globe. The multidisciplinary artist Phax Ahamada, born in Madagascar and raised in Paris, is now based in Gothenburg. His audience might find him performing in public squares as well as on the grand stages of cultural institutions, or teaching and mentoring the next generation of artists in search of their own expressive voices. Within the international worlds of dance, performing arts, and hip hop, Phax is since long regarded a legend, celebrated for his distinctive slow-motion style, in which influences merge into a profoundly personal form of storytelling.
The more space you give to others, the more you share, the greater your own space becomes.
Trinidad
Carrillo
While photography remains Trinidad Carrillo’s primary visual medium, her artistic practice spans multiple disciplines, including music, text, performance, and film. Her most recent photo book, Oneiromance (2024), explores plants and herbs imbued with magical or sacred significance, primarily portrayed in her native Peru.
Through the camera, I discover something else - something the eye alone cannot see.
Yukimi
Nagano
After nearly thirty years as the lead singer of the Gothenburg-based band Little Dragon, Yukimi Nagano made her solo debut in the spring of 2025 with the album For You. As with Little Dragon’s multifaceted sound, her music moves freely across influences and genres. R&B, soul, electronica, jazz, funk, and pop intertwine in a highly personal musical language, where technical mastery never overshadows playfulness or surprise.
When I step onto the stage, I imagine my energy expanding, stretching out like a horizon so that I can reach and move everyone.
Olle
Norås
Originally trained as a blacksmith, Olle Norås gradually changed course during his studies at Steneby School of Craft and Design, shifting from iron and steel to watercolour and gouache. His abstract and distinctive works on paper often retain a relief-like three-dimensionality; the image itself is sometimes cut out, leaving the flat surface behind. Teeming organic forms and meticulous order coexist in a visual world that reveals new layers the longer one looks.
When I begin a painting and face the blank paper, it is as if the image already exists beneath the surface, it simply needs to be coaxed out in the right way.
Malte
Persson
To briefly summarise Malte Persson’s wide-ranging literary career is nearly impossible. Poetry, often metrical or rhymed, narrative prose, essays, and children’s literature. Epigrams, columns, literary criticism, translations, and even poetry inscribed on street manhole covers. Since his 2002 debut novel Livet på den här planeten (Life on This Planet), he has published nearly twenty books. His most recent works, the poetry collection Skapelser (Creations) and the children’s book Knut och Klas på knytkalas (Potluck with Pat and Puck), were both released in 2024.
For me, there are no strict boundaries between genres or forms of expression, I simply do what I find enjoyable.
Julia
Sporsén
Though Julia Sporsén’s roots in Gothenburg’s musical life might seem inevitable, her path home went through London, where she studied and built a successful opera career before returning to Sweden. Since her 2015 debut at the Göteborg Opera, she has been widely praised for her deeply expressive interpretations and magnetic stage presence. In March 2026, she will return to the same stage in the title role of Janáček’s Jenůfa.
My goal is for the audience to forget that I am singing — for the expression itself to make everything else fade away.
164 successful culture scholars
Once a year, the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture awards three to six exceptional talents in the arts & culture sector – stage and screen acting, music, dance, pictorial arts, art handicraft, sculpture, literature, and circus performance art, to name a few. 164 individuals have been awarded since it was instated in 1996, providing them with the means to evolve as cultural practitioners. They represent Sweden’s top tier in the arts & culture sphere, and many have achieved international acclaim.
The Foundation selects candidates; it is not possible to apply for this scholarship.
