ARTnews Reveals the Seven-Person Jury Behind Its 2026 Awards

The third annual ARTnews Awards has unveiled its 2026 winners, picked by a jury of five US-based curators and two ARTnews editors who reviewed exhibitions that opened between August 2025 and July 2026. The panel nominated and voted across six categories. Its rules were tidy: traveling shows counted only at their first US stop, and each juror nominated one to three exhibitions per category. Two meetings produced the nominees and the winners.

Who sat on the jury? A spread of institutions, from Chicago to the Great Salt Lake.

Giampaolo Bianconi, Art Institute of Chicago

Bianconi is Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he handles acquisitions, exhibitions and collection displays. His current shows are "Jill Mulleady: The Passenger" and "Tony Cokes: On Boredom." Past projects include exhibitions by Marwa Arsanios, Charles Atlas, Louise Bourgeois, Edgar Calel, Renée Green, Iman Issa, Ellsworth Kelly, John Knight, Gladys Nilsson, Lorraine O'Grady and Nora Turato. His H. C. Westermann survey, "Anchor Clanker," ran for a full year and came with a catalogue placing the artist within postwar American art. His scholarship covers the political economy of artistic form, technology, circulation and the histories suppressed in standard avant-garde narratives.

Jordan Carter, Dia Art Foundation

Carter joined Dia as curator in 2021. There he has curated and commissioned exhibitions of work by Jo Baer, stanley brouwn, Tony Cokes, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Maren Hassinger, Mary Heilmann, Agnes Martin, Cameron Rowland, Lucas Samaras, Keith Sonnier and Haegue Yang, among others. He leads development and display of Dia's permanent collection and oversees its Utah sites — Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973–76) — plus stewardship of Cameron Rowland's Depreciation (2018). Earlier posts: the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, MoMA New York, Studio Museum in Harlem and Walker Art Center. He holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the Courtauld, where he focused on Fluxus and global conceptual art.

Lauren Cornell, CCS Bard

Cornell is Artistic Director of the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She has organized surveys of Sky Hopinka, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Martine Syms, Leidy Churchman and Erika Verzutti, plus retrospectives of Dara Birnbaum, Stan Douglas, Ho Tzu Nyen (with Tom Eccles and the Singapore Art Museum) and Nil Yalter (with the Museum Ludwig). From 2005 to 2017 she worked at the New Museum, where she also served as Executive Director of its digital art affiliate Rhizome (2005–12).

Miranda Lash, MCA Denver

Lash is Ellen Bruss Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her practice spans media and geographies, with particular attention to place, regional identity and layered histories. Recent Denver projects include solo shows of new work by Deborah Jack, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Tomashi Jackson, Clarissa Tossin, Eamon Ore-Giron and Jason Moran, plus group shows "Colorado Currents" (2026, co-curated with Leilani Lynch) and the touring "Cowboy" (2023, with Nora Burnett Abrams). She was co–Artistic Director of Prospect New Orleans's sixth edition, "The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home" (2024–25), co-curated with Ebony G. Patterson. She has served on the Joan Mitchell Foundation board since 2019, now as co-President with Paul Ramirez Jonas. Harvard BA; Williams College MA.

Diana Nawi, LACMA

Nawi joined the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as Curator of Special Projects in Contemporary Art in 2024. She co-curated "Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living" at the Hammer Museum with Pablo José Ramirez and, with Naima J. Keith, was Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Director of "Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow" in New Orleans. As an independent curator she organized exhibitions at the Olivia Foundation, Mexico City; California African American Museum; Long Museum, Shanghai; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Prior roles: Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Abu Dhabi Project.

The ARTnews editors

Maximilíano Durón, senior editor since joining in 2014, is a queer, Chicanx journalist and critic covering artists of color, Latinx/Chicanx and queer artists and their intersections; he manages ARTnews's art fair and Top 200 Collectors coverage, won the 2023 Rabkin Prize and co-founded Critical Minded. He studied journalism and art history at NYU. Alex Greenberger, deputy editor, started as an editorial assistant in 2015; he has covered the 2018–19 Whitney protests, the Documenta 15 controversy of 2022, and written criticism on body horror, video art's history, Picasso's legacy and artists including Wangechi Mutu, Wolfgang Tillmans and Marlene Dumas. His work has also run in Artspace and the Village Voice. He holds a BA in art history and cinema studies from NYU.

With winners now announced, the 2026 edition completes the awards' third cycle — and gives six US exhibitions a jury-vetted line for their press releases.