Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation

The Rabkin Prize celebrates the essential work of arts journalists who are at the center of our most important conversations, help us think together in public, create the original field research for art history, and bear witness to the work of artists.

The 2026 Rabkin Prize winners are: Damien Davis, an artist, educator, and writer whose work explores how power, race, and cultural narratives are constructed and circulated; Melaine Ferdinand-King, a cultural strategist, poet, and writer focused on historical and community narratives, and the inaugural curator of the African American Museum of Rhode Island; Tyler Green, a critic, author, and longtime host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast; Alicia Inez Guzmán, a critic and award-winning investigative journalist focused on culture and land use; Julia Halperin, a critic, editor, investigative data journalist, and co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report, which tracks equity and representation in the art world; Sarah Lewis, an award-winning author, associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and founder of Vision & Justice, an initiative that reveals the role of culture in representational democracy; Jan Tumlir, an author, editor, educator, and founding editor of the Los Angeles-based contemporary art journal X-TRA; and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, a journalist and critic with decades of international reporting experience who writes often about the relationship between art and politics.

Please help us celebrate the 10th cohort of Rabkin Prize winners and take a behind-the-scenes look as artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki makes portraits of these award-winning arts journalists in the spaces where they write.

To read more about these writers, visit our website. Link in bio.

Next week, our interviews with this year’s winners begin publishing on Wednesdays. You can subscribe to the Rabkin Interviews podcast on Substack and the usual podcasting platforms.