Winners announced for our 2025 Student Awards

We are delighted to announce our 2025 Student Award winners. We would like to extend a huge thank you to our funding partners for their generosity and support.

RSA John Kinross Scholarships

This year twelve graduates have received RSA John Kinross Scholarships, which fund a period of 6 to 12 weeks in Florence to research and develop their practice. Florence has been an inspiration to generations of artists and architects and this opportunity allows successful applicants to experience its magnificent history, study its art and architecture, learn the language and create a visual record of their experience.

2024 winners:

Laura Bullock | Ching En Lin | Esther Forse | Siobhan Ironside | Thea Moston | Purshottam Pawar | Sophie Scott | Tom Speedy | Harvey Stapleton | Ella Williams | Anney White | Zuza Woźnicka

RSA Barns-Graham Travel Award

Edinburgh College of Art graduate Laura Compton has received the 2025 RSA Barns-Graham Travel Award. Laura plans to use the £2,000 funds to travel to Slovenia to visit the Škocjan Caves. Through producing soundscapes and smell-scapes, she hopes to create an immersive sculptural experience that engages the senses in the same way as an actual cave. By immersing herself in these environments, Laura aims to progress the sense of movement, animation and uncanniness in her site-responsive work.

 Laura Compton, Eruption from the Floor

RSA David Michie Travel Award

Lilian Evans from Glasgow School of Art has received the 2025 RSA David Michie Travel Award, which provides £2,500 to a graduating or postgraduate drawing and painting student. Lilian will use the award funds to travel to Seattle, Washington, USA, a city shaped by industry and networks of global trade. Lilian’s work engages with discarded materials, utilising unusual materials such as the side curtains of lorries, objects that have travelled great distances, weathered time, and absorbed traces of past journeys. Seattle’s strong sustainability culture and artist-led initiatives in material reuse make will make it an ideal place for Lilian to further engage with these objects and explore their histories while giving them new form and purpose.

 Lilian Evans, you were never not mine

RSA Blackadder Houston ECA Travel Awards

Emilie Fielding and Shanshan Mo have both received a 2025 RSA Blackadder Houston Student Travel Award, which funds a period of international travel for graduating and postgraduate painting students from Edinburgh College of Art (ECA)

Emilie Fielding’s practice is inspired by communities around the UK and Europe which explore the idea of living history. With her £3,000 award funds, Emilie will travel to Larvik, Norway, a city known for celebrating its Viking and Saxon origins. While there she will learn about early Scandinavian history and undertake local ‘pilgrim walks’ to visit ancient ruins and stone settings.

Emilie Fielding, The Bees Were Here

Shanshan Mo will travel to Hamburg, Germany, to visit Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel and to explore the philosophical tension between Eastern and German thought which has long drawn her to the region. Through this journey, Shanshan hopes to engage space physically and respond to perception through materials, creating a series of life drawings, visual records, and experimental works that explore the relationship between present space and present identity.

Shanshan Mo, Injured Ear

Find out more about RSA opportunites