Awards for Artists

In response to COVID-19, our normal selection process is being put to one side this year. In its place, every eligible visual artist and composer nominated for the 2020 awards will receive £10,000. Read more

Awards for Artists supports individuals at a timely moment in their careers, giving them the freedom to develop their creative ideas and contributing to their personal and professional growth. The awards are made every year and come with no strings attached – artists are free to use the money in whichever way they decide. Ten awards of £60,000 each are made annually, five to visual artists and five to composers.

The awards are a closed application process, with participation in the scheme each year by invitation only. The 2020 nomination process is now complete.

We announced the recipients of Awards for Artists 2019 in November and would like to take this opportunity to thank judges, nominators and composer and 2017 recipient Byron Wallen and his band Four Corners for their inspiring performance at our 25th anniversary celebration.

2019 Visual artists

Larry Achiampong

Larry Achiampong

Larry Achiampong (born 1984) employs imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity. He works individually and coll...

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Phoebe Boswell

Phoebe Boswell

Phoebe Boswell (born 1982) makes work that explores the sense of ‘belonging’ and is anchored to a restless state of diasporic consciousness, combining traditional drawing with digital technology. Her practice draws on her own experiences...

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Adam Christensen

Adam Christensen

Adam Christensen (born 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist whose working practice is primarily realised through textiles, music and installation, blurring the boundaries between everyday life and fiction. Based on his immediate experienc...

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Harold Offeh

Harold Offeh

Harold Offeh (born 1977) works in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and aspects of conte...

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Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard (born 1953) has developed a practice that is realised within a context of history, landscape and environment, complexities of race, autobiography and aspects of Britishness. Interrogating the histories of photography, Poll...

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2019 Composers

Eleanor Alberga

Eleanor Alberga

Eleanor Alberga (born 1949) incorporates a spectrum of genres into her work, from Eurocentric contemporary references to Jamaican and African tonal elements. Chamber music is a key feature of her work, both in the more traditional form o...

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Laura Jurd

Laura Jurd

Laura Jurd (born 1990) is a composer and trumpet player working in the fields of improvised and contemporary music. With a background in both jazz and classical, Jurd brings musical elements from outside the world of jazz music into the ...

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Mark Lockheart

Mark Lockheart

Mark Lockheart (born 1961) holds improvisation at the heart of his compositional practice. He takes ideas that appear through the natural process of playing his primary instrument, the saxophone, and develops these into more substantial ...

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Nathaniel Mann

Nathaniel Mann

Nathaniel Mann (born 1982) is an experimental composer, performer and sound designer. Oscillating between music and sound, Mann has a compositional practice that is expansive in scope and varied in form. He takes on many roles in his wor...

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Shiori Usui

Shiori Usui

Shiori Usui (born 1981) composes works which incorporate elements from an expansive range of sources, from Bulgarian folk music to Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, an insect-pathogenic fungus. Usui’s compositions are often ...

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