Bourses aux artistes – Programme Arts et Lettres de Montréal

This is CALQ's way in for artists who have never had a CALQ grant before. It funds an artistic project — in music or chanson among eleven other disciplines — by an emerging artist based on the island of Montreal.

Eligibility is narrow and worth checking carefully. You must have no more than five years of professional artistic practice at the moment you apply, counted across your whole path, including years spent in another discipline; specific conditions vary by discipline. You must never have received a CALQ grant. And you must live in the Montreal administrative region, which means Montreal itself plus Baie-D'Urfé, Beaconsfield, Côte-Saint-Luc, Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Dorval, Hampstead, Kirkland, L'Île-Dorval, Mont-Royal, Montréal-Est, Montréal-Ouest, Pointe-Claire, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Senneville. Laval and the north and south shores are excluded, even though they sit inside the greater Montreal area.

The maximum is $15,000 per selected project. The support is for research, creation, exploration and production. One structural detail catches people out: your project has to begin after the submission deadline, so build your timeline accordingly.

Applications close at 23:59 on 2 September 2026 and go through the CALQ online portal. The programme is run in French and the call, the forms and the guidelines are published in French only. CALQ does not publish assessment criteria on the call page itself — check the discipline-specific guidelines, which appear once you select your discipline. For recent rounds, seventeen emerging artists shared $222,800 across all disciplines.