Most artists, when they look at a residency review page, look at the star average. A 4.5 looks good, a 3.8 looks marginal, a 4.9 looks unbeatable. That's the wrong number to optimize for. A four-star average can hide three different residencies — a great program that everyone slightly underrates, a mediocre program with five glowing reviews from friends, or a real powerhouse that one person rated low for personal reasons that don't apply to you.

Here's how I actually read a residency's review page when I'm deciding whether to apply.

Read the lowest review first

Skip past the five-stars. The lowest-rated review will tell you whether the program has a structural problem (food, staff communication, facilities, cohort dynamics, hidden costs) that will affect your experience too — or whether it had a personal-fit issue that has nothing to do with you.

Two things to look for:

  • Specific complaints. "The kitchen closed at 7pm and the nearest restaurant was 30 minutes away" is structural. "I didn't connect with the other fellows" is personal. Structural complaints scale. Personal-fit complaints don't.
  • Reply patterns. Did the program respond? Did other reviewers push back? A program that handles negative feedback gracefully in public is one that probably handles it gracefully when you're there.

Compare reviews from the same year

Residencies change. A program that was great in 2018 may have lost its best staff in 2021 and become merely fine in 2024. When you read reviews, sort by year and weight the recent ones harder.

The Twenty Years of Artist Residencies piece showed how much the field has shifted since 2005 — programs that were on top then have closed, transformed, or stalled, and new ones have emerged. The same dynamic plays out at five-year and even three-year intervals. The 2019 cohort at a residency may report a completely different experience than the 2023 cohort.

If RMAR has fewer than three reviews from the last two years, treat the older ones as background information rather than a verdict.

Read for the things the website doesn't say

The most useful reviews on RMAR aren't the ones that confirm the website. They're the ones that contradict it.

When you see a review that mentions:

  • A hidden cost the website didn't list (mandatory materials fee, mandatory studio cleaning fee, paid Wi-Fi in a remote location, surprise gratuities). The True Cost Calculator can incorporate this, but the website won't.
  • Cohort dynamics that surprised the reviewer. Cohort matters as much as facilities. If a writers' residency turns out to be 80% visual artists in practice, that changes the experience.
  • Practical issues with travel, internet, food, or the surrounding town. These are the things alumni learn the hard way; reading them in a review saves you that lesson.
  • Disability accessibility — if any reviewer mentions accommodations, count that as data. If no reviewer mentions accessibility and you need it, ask the program directly.

The website is a marketing document. Reviews are field reports. They're the document that matters.

Use the granular ratings as a sanity check

RMAR lets reviewers rate housing, studio, community, food, staff, and value separately. When the overall rating is 4.5 but the food rating is 2.8, you know something specific. The reviewer liked the program enough to recommend it, but you should arrive with a backup plan for meals — extra granola bars, a budget for in-town restaurants, an electric kettle.

Discrepancies between granular ratings are signals. A high community + low staff means cohort-driven program. A high staff + low community means the staff is doing the heavy lifting because the cohort isn't gelling. A high housing + low studio means a comfortable place that doesn't support production well. Each pattern shapes what you should expect.

Trust the longest reviews more than the shortest

A five-star review that says "Loved it!" carries less information than a four-star review with three paragraphs explaining what worked, what didn't, and what the reviewer wished they'd known. Length correlates with thoughtfulness. Both kinds get counted in the rating, but you should weight them differently when you're trying to make a decision.

If a residency has only short, glowing reviews and one or two long, thoughtful, mixed ones, the long mixed ones are the truer signal.

When there are no reviews

For newer programs (or programs RMAR hasn't yet collected reviews for), the absence is real information too. A program with a strong reputation but zero RMAR reviews probably means the alumni haven't been asked. If you've attended, leave one — your future-applicant peers will thank you. (Reviews on RMAR are free, no account needed; you confirm your email and the review goes live.)

If you're considering a no-review program, that's the time to email two alumni directly via LinkedIn, Instagram, or the program's website. Five-minute conversations with people who attended in the last two years will tell you everything the missing reviews would have.

The full system

When I'm evaluating a residency to apply to, my actual sequence is:

  1. Filter to the relevant subset on RMAR — discipline, location, cost type, application mode. Use the funded or family-friendly collections if those apply.
  2. Read the program's RMAR page for the verified-attendee reviews, the cost structure, the deadlines, the open call.
  3. Run the True Cost Calculator with my home situation. If the number is unaffordable, decide whether to apply for a fellowship within the program, apply for outside funding, or skip.
  4. Set a free deadline reminder so I don't miss the application window even if I get pulled into client work.
  5. Apply. This is the actual work.

Reviews are the system that ties the rest together. They're how an artist who's never been to a place evaluates whether to spend three hours and $30 finding out. The platform is only useful if the reviews are honest and there are enough of them. That's why we built RMAR to make leaving one as easy as possible — and why we treat the review page as the most important page on every residency profile.

Have you attended a residency? Leave a review — no account needed, just email verification. Every honest review makes the next applicant's decision easier.