Free Art Competitions in 2027: Where to Submit Your Work Online
Free art competitions are not a consolation category. Some of the largest competitions in the world charge nothing to enter, and a growing number of smaller juried calls have dropped entry fees entirely, charging only selected finalists or nothing at all. For an artist building a record, they are the cheapest experiment available: the only thing you risk is the time it takes to prepare a submission.
This guide lists competitions that are free to enter in the 2027 cycle, each checked on the organiser's own page. Cycles move every year, and organisers change terms between editions, so check the official rules before planning around any date. For the current year's edition of this guide, see Free Art Competitions in 2026.
What "free" actually means
Read the fee structure, not the headline. Competitions handle money in four ways, and all four call themselves free at some point:
- Free entry, no fees at any stage. Rare at scale; the Sony World Photography Awards is the best-known example.
- Free entry, finalist fee. Entering and being judged costs nothing; artists selected for the exhibition pay a fee that covers documentation and production. This is the model we use at Curatone.art, and the fee is only ever asked after selection.
- Free category inside a paid competition. A student or youth category is free while the main competition charges.
- Fee waivers by circumstance. Some large awards charge most entrants but waive the fee for young photographers or for entrants from particular countries. Check the conditions on the organiser's own page; they change between editions.
None of these models is dishonest. A problem exists only when money is a condition of the result itself — if paying changes your chances, you are looking at a different kind of event; our guide on how to spot a fake art competition covers the warning signs.
Free competitions with 2027 deadlines
Every call in this table is free to enter and was checked on the organiser's own page; the date of that check is shown with each entry. Calls that have closed fold away at the bottom.
Three categories: a single photograph, a series of three to five, and scientific or medical imaging. Illustration, moving image and AI-generated images are excluded. The prize is named for 2027; entries close in October 2026.
Applications are free; selected work is shown in 22,000 m² of a former iron foundry and an 80,000 m² sculpture park, 5 June – 3 October 2027. Up to ten images per application.
Up to three works per artist. Judged by an international jury; finalists receive diplomas and an evaluation.
For photography students, judged on a set theme. The Youth competition, for entrants under 19, closes 5 January 2027.
Single Image closes 5 January 2027 at 16:00 GMT; the Series competition closes a week later, on 12 January 2027.
Recently closed (1)
One winner from one image. Any 2D or 3D medium; AI-generated work is not accepted.
Deadlines and fees are read from each organiser’s own page on the date shown with the entry. They do change — check the organiser’s site before you prepare an entry.
A competition named for 2027 usually takes its entries in 2026: the year in the name is the year it is judged or shown. Several of the calls above close in October and November 2026.
Sony World Photography Awards 2027
Organised by the World Photography Organisation and free to enter. The Single Image competition closes on 5 January 2027 and the Series competition a week later, on 12 January; the Student competition closes on 27 November 2026, and the Youth competition, for entrants under 19, on 5 January 2027. The Single Image winner receives $5,000, and the Series winner $25,000 and a solo exhibition. For photographers it remains the reference point among free competitions. We cover the photography field in more depth in Photography Competitions 2026–2027.
NordArt 2027
Deadline 31 October 2026. One of the largest annual exhibitions of contemporary art in Europe, held at Kunstwerk Carlshütte in Büdelsdorf, northern Germany. Application is free and open to artists from around the world, with up to ten images per application. Selected work is shown from 5 June to 3 October 2027 in a former iron foundry and a sculpture park, and the NordArt Prize is €10,000.
Wellcome Photography Prize 2027
Deadline 21 October 2026. Free to enter at any level and from anywhere in the world, with three categories: a single photograph, a series of three to five, and scientific or medical imaging. Each category winner receives £10,000, and 22 further entries receive £1,000 each. Illustration, moving image and AI-generated images are not accepted.
Curatone.art — Portrait & Figure
Deadline 1 November 2026. Our own current call: an international juried competition for portrait and figurative work. Entry is free and finalists pay $25; every work is scored by the jury on a published ten-point scale, and selected finalists receive a numbered certificate, a juried online exhibition, and a permanent entry in the winners archive. Results are published on 16 November 2026. See the call and the rules; new calls open every few weeks on the competitions page, so if you are reading this after November, the current one is listed there.
Not yet announced
Some of the best-known free and reduced-fee competitions had not published their next entry window when this guide was updated, among them Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the World Press Photo Contest. They are added to the table once their deadlines and fees appear on the organisers' own pages.
Almost free: low-fee competitions worth knowing
If your budget allows one or two modest fees a year, a few competitions sit just outside the free list but reward the spend with real selection and real visibility. The Pastel Society's annual exhibition at Mall Galleries in London, for example, charges £22 a work (£14.50 for artists aged 35 or under); see our list of open calls by deadline for paid calls alongside the free ones. For more on fees and what they do and do not buy, see Are Art Competitions Worth It?
How to use a free competition well
- Enter work that fits the theme, not the work you most want seen. Jurors reject off-theme work first; our guide on what judges look for explains the scoring.
- Submit files that survive full-screen viewing. Weak photography loses strong work — see how to photograph artwork.
- Collect the record. A selection means nothing on a CV if it cannot be verified later. Keep certificates, catalogue entries and result pages; an exhibition record is built from exactly these documents.
Free entry removes the only barrier that is about money rather than work. The rest — the selection, the record, the slow accumulation of a public history — is the same as everywhere else in the juried world, and it is open to anyone willing to submit.