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Main Post of #BirdArtWeek2025

Art by previous Lead Artists (left to right) Charlotte Belland, Owen Tattersall, Zoe Keller, Sofía Betancur Silva , Lauren Richelieu, Venus and Nayan, and Theo Chang Andreu,

Now Recruiting: Lead Artists for 2026!

#BirdArtWeek will be here before you know it.

Starting January 18, 2026, #BirdArtWeek is a mini art challenge on Instagram lasting only a week. It encourages participants in the bird-enthusiast community to follow along with a series of creative prompts celebrating birds. We recruit lead artists like you to each create and introduce prompts each day of the challenge. (Here's our opening post from last year.) 

Interested in leading as an artist with your own challenge, and having your artwork featured on the @CornellBirds Instagram page? All mediums are welcome! Fill out the form below before November 22 to be considered. You must be over 18 years of age to apply.

How #BirdArtWeek Works:

  1. Each lead artist creates one bird-centered prompt, with one artist for each day of the week. Participants on Instagram follow along and create art for each prompt.
  2. Each lead artist will “host” a different day of the challenge. They will each write up their own prompt (submitted early) and include a pre-created version of their prompt with their post, encouraging others to submit their own. All mediums are welcome, as long as they can be featured through an Instagram post!
  3. Each day, we’ll randomly select participants using the day’s hashtag or #BirdArtWeek2026 to receive a free Bird Academy course
  4. On the final day, we’ll do a wrap-up post with a gallery of participant posts and a callout for the gifted Bird Academy courses. 

Participating as a lead artist entails creating a bird-related prompt and submitting an art piece in advance, that’s it! We’ll post through the main Cornell Lab Instagram channel, linking back to your preferred page or social media as we do.

We're so excited to open Lead Artist recruitment again this year!

We'd love the opportunity to spotlight even more artists and we can't wait to hear from you!

What is a prompt?

Prompts are bird-related. They could be anything from a color to a bird family to a bird behavior—anything that inspires you about birds and is still general enough to inspire creativity in others. Ideally, prompts can be expressed with a hashtag that is 1–4 words long. We'd love to hear any prompt ideas you might have now, but Lead Artists won't need a final prompt until early January. You have lots of time to get creative!

Art Use Details

Lead Artists retain all rights to their creative work. Lead Artists agree that Cornell Lab will be able to use Lead Artists' #BirdArtWeek artwork only for the purposes of promoting #BirdArtWeek in this and future years, with artist attribution. Promotion may occur in social channels, via email, and through Cornell Lab webpages.

Questions? Concerns?

Please reach out to us at birdacademy@birds.cornell.edu