$100,000 Soros Grants Go to Artists Cannupa Hanska Luger, Yto Barrada, Carolina Caycedo, and More

The Open Society Foundations have named the recipients of the 2023 Soros Arts Fellowships, which supports socially-engaged art.

This year, 18 mid-career artists were given $100,000 each to realize projects addressing issues such as the climate crisis, furthering Indigenous knowledge, and sustainability over the next 18 months.

“Art and culture are essential drivers for social change,” Tatiana Mouarbes, Open Society’s team manager for culture and art, expression, said in a statement.

One recipient, Palestinian artist Nida Sinnokrot, cofounded a Palestinian academy of agrarian traditions and contemporary art, and serves as a faculty member in the art, culture, and technology program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

“It’s our duty to find the strength to keep the despair at bay in the face of the unimaginable,” Sinnokrot told the Associated Press. “We have to, as artists, find the courage to disrupt convention, practice the spreading of hope and cultivate new stories and imaginaries that challenge divisive binaries.”

Sinnokrot joins a number of notable recipients, among them, artists Cannupa Hanska Luger, Carolina Caycedo, and Yto Barrada.

“There’s a clear need for bold action, for justice and for equity-based solutions to ensure a more regenerative and life-sustaining world,” Mouarbes told AP. “Systems of global colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism have long stripped the environment of its natural resources.”

2023 Soros Arts Fellowships Recipients
Bilia Bah
Cannupa Hanska Luger 
Carolina Caycedo 
Chemi Rosado-Seijo 
Dalton Paula 
Deborah Jack 
Fehras Publishing Practices (Kenan Darwich and Sami Rustom)
Ixchel Tonāntzin Xōchitlzihuatl 
Jordan Weber 
Martha Atienza 
Molemo Moiloa 
Mónica de Miranda
Nida Sinnokrot 
Omar Berrada 
Rijin Sahakian
Sari Dennise
Yto Barrada