ARTnews Awards 2026: About the Jury
The third annual ARTnews Awards, an editorial project honoring excellence in art achievements at US arts institutions, has just revealed the winners for its 2026 edition. To help select this year’s winners, ARTnews invited five esteemed US-based curators, along with two ARTnews editors, to review exhibitions that opened between August 2025 and July 2026. Traveling exhibitions were only eligible for their first US stop. Each juror nominated 1–3 exhibitions per category. Over the course of two meetings, the jury chose a group of nominees and a winner in each of six categories. Read more about each juror below.
Giampaolo Bianconi
Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago
Giampaolo Bianconi is currently the Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he works across acquisitions, exhibitions, and collection displays. His current exhibitions are “Jill Mulleady: The Passenger” and “Tony Cokes: On Boredom.” Bianconi has organized exhibitions by artists including Marwa Arsanios, Charles Atlas, Louise Bourgeois, Edgar Calel, Renée Green, Iman Issa, Ellsworth Kelly, John Knight, Jill Mulleady, Gladys Nilsson, Lorraine O’Grady, and Nora Turato. His H. C. Westermann survey, “Anchor Clanker,” was on view for one year and accompanied by a catalogue that situated the artist within broader histories of postwar American art. His scholarship engages the political economy of artistic form, technology and circulation, and the histories suppressed in standard avant-garde narratives. He speaks widely about contemporary art and is regularly in public conversation with artists.
Jordan Carter
Curator, Dia Art Foundation
Jordan Carter joined Dia Art Foundation as curator in 2021. At Dia, 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. Carter plays a lead role in the development and display of Dia’s permanent collection and oversees the preservation of and programming around its Utah sites—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76)—as well as the stewardship of Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018).
Carter has also held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He received a BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he focused on Fluxus and global conceptual art.
Lauren Cornell
Artistic Director of the Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard)
Lauren Cornell is the Artistic Director of the Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). At the Hessel Museum, she has organized surveys of Sky Hopinka, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Martine Syms, Leidy Churchman, and Erika Verzutti, as well as career 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, Cornell worked at the New Museum in New York, where she also served as Executive Director of its digital art affiliate Rhizome (2005–12).
Miranda Lash
Ellen Bruss Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
Miranda Lash is the Ellen Bruss Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Throughout her career, she has worked with museums and arts institutions to expand modern and contemporary art collections, commission new artworks, and develop groundbreaking exhibitions and scholarship that foster experimentation. Her curatorial practice moves across a wide range of media and geographies, with particular attention to the ways that place, regional identity, and layered histories shape contemporary art.
At MCA Denver, Lash’s recent projects include solo exhibitions of new work by Deborah Jack, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Tomashi Jackson, Clarissa Tossin, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Jason Moran, as well as large-scale group exhibitions including “Colorado Currents” (2026), co-curated with Leilani Lynch, and the touring exhibition “Cowboy” (2023), co-curated with Nora Burnett Abrams. Lash served as co–Artistic Director of “The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home,” the sixth edition of the international art triennial Prospect New Orleans (2024–25), which she co-curated with Ebony G. Patterson. Since 2019, Lash has served on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and currently serves as co-President alongside Paul Ramirez Jonas. Lash holds a BA with honors in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Diana Nawi
Curator of Special Projects in Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Diana Nawi joined LACMA as Curator of Special Projects in Contemporary Art in 2024. Prior to that Nawi co-curated “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” at the Hammer Museum with Pablo José Ramirez, and alongside Naima J. Keith, she was the Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Director of “Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow,” a citywide triennial in New Orleans. Working as an independent curator, Nawi has organized exhibitions at the Olivia Foundation, Mexico City; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Long Museum, Shanghai; and REDCAT, Los Angeles; among others. Prior to her independent work, Nawi held curatorial positions at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Abu Dhabi Project.
Maximilíano Durón
Senior Editor, ARTnews
Maximilíano Durón is a queer, Chicanx journalist and critic covering contemporary art. His writing focuses on the work of artists of color, specifically Latinx/Chicanx artists, queer artists, and their intersections, as well as curators, collectors, and scholars whose work has transformed the art world. He has been at ARTnews since 2014 and is currently senior editor, managing the publication’s art fair and Top 200 Collectors coverage. Durón is a winner of the 2023 Rabkin Prize for visual art journalists and a founding member of Critical Minded, an initiative that looks to support the work of a diverse intergenerational group of cultural critics of color. He received his undergraduate degree from NYU in journalism and art history.
Alex Greenberger
Deputy Editor, ARTnews
Alex Greenberger is deputy editor at ARTnews, having started there as an editorial assistant in 2015. He has covered topics ranging from protests against a former Whitney Museum vice chair in 2018 and 2019 to the controversy involving charges of anti-Semitism and harassment in Documenta 15 in 2022. In his criticism, Greenberger has addressed body horror, the history of video art, the legacy of Pablo Picasso, and the work of artists Wangechi Mutu, Wolfgang Tillmans, Marlene Dumas, and innumerable others. His articles have also appeared in Artspace and the Village Voice, and in gallery catalogs. He graduated from New York University with a BA in art history and cinema studies.
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