How can writers draw from museums, collections, and archives to shape creative work?

Situated within NUS Museum and engaging with its art and archival collections, Writing Lab is a semester-long programme running from September to November 2025 that offers eight emerging writers a museum-based structure for cultivating multifaceted creative writing practices.

Over the course of the programme, participants will encounter a range of visual and textual objects drawn from NUS Museum’s holdings and exhibitions—including prep-room: From Jurong Island to Selat Sembilan, Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art, and the T.K. Sabapathy Archives. Writing in response to such materials invites a different kind of attention that is shaped by frameworks of display and the echoes of multiple tellings.

These museum-based encounters serve as springboards for writing, reflection, and imagination, encouraging participants to approach archival and anecdotal materials not as static repository of fact, but as sites of lived entanglements where history unfolds through gestures, correspondences, and contradictions.

Through creative writing workshops led by playwright Jean Tay, artist-writer ila, and theatre practitioner Chong Gua Khee, participants will be introduced to a range of critical and creative strategies for developing their practice. In their creative writing journey, they will be invited to consider how personal experiences, inherited memory, and broader narrative frameworks intersect. Each participant will independently develop a piece of creative writing, to be shared in a public reading in early November 2025 and collated into a digital reader published later by NUS Museum.

Application Opens: 11 August 2025

Application Deadline: 25 August 2025

Confirmation of Participants: 1 Sep 2025

APPLY NOW

• Students from NUS and other Institutes of Higher Learning are welcome to apply for Writing Lab. Recent graduates within the last year are also eligible to participate in the Writing Lab.
• Candidates who can commit to the entire duration of Writing Lab are preferred.

• Apply by filling up the form here.
• You will be required to submit an expression of intent, as well as a writing portfolio, for the application in the link above.
• Due to the large volume of applications, we regret to inform that only successful applicants will be informed by 1 Sep 2025.

A look back at Writing Lab 2014

Writing Lab 2025 follows on from the first iteration of Writing Lab 2014, which was a seven-week script writing mentorship programme facilitated by Huzir Sulaiman of Checkpoint Theatre. Participants wrote short plays that drew from or intersected with the Museum’s collections, locating history as a site of multiple reflections and refractions.

Facilitator Bios

Jean Tay graduated in 1997 with a double-degree in creative writing and economics from Brown University, USA. Jean was attached to the Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT) as resident playwright from 2006-2009. She was also writer-in-residence at the Nanyang Technological University in 2013 and is currently an adjunct lecturer in playwriting there. Her plays Everything but the Brain and Boom have been published by Epigram Books, and Boom is currently used as an ‘O’ and ‘N’ Level literature text for secondary school students.

With a practice that encompasses performance, photography, moving image and sound, ila (b. 1985, Singapore) creates alternative entry points for experiencing the peripheries of lived experience and unspoken narratives. She often reconfigures and merges speculative fiction with factual histories to conceive sites for empathy and connectivity in her work. She has participated in group shows in Singapore such as Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha, Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, National Gallery Singapore (2020) and in festivals such as ASEAN-EU Cultural Festival (2022).

Chong Gua Khee is a multidisciplinary director and dramaturg who collaborates across Singapore/Asia and Helsinki/Europe. Her practice often probes (and pokes!) at the interconnections between social issues and food, music, dance and touch, and key long-term projects for Gua Khee include theatre-concert dreams of food (2024-ongoing) and dance performance series Tactility Studies (2019-ongoing).

Central to her practice is pleasure-as-resistance and hope-as-action, and it is in this spirit that she also co-stewards CITRUS practices (2021-ongoing), a collective that organises to deepen and expand care practices for arts workers. She is currently pursuing a Master’s of Directing in University of the Arts, Helsinki.

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