The Feminist Art Project

2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Awards
2024-11-21 08:00 - 2024-12-30 17:00 (America/New_York)
Anonymous Was A Woman is an unrestricted grant that enables women artists, over 40 years of age and at a significant juncture in their lives or careers, to continue to grow and pursue their work. The Award is given in recognition of an artist’s accomplishments, artistic growth, originality and potential. It is not need-based. The Award is by nomination only.
The name of the grant program, Anonymous Was A Woman, refers to a line in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. As the name implies, nominators and those associated with the program are unnamed. The award was begun in 1996 in response to the decision of the National Endowment of the Arts to cease support of individual artists.
Each year, an outstanding group of distinguished women – art historians, curators, writers and previous winners from across the country – serve as nominators. To date, over 600 have participated.
For the first time, awardees will receive $50,000. Two of the 2024 awards were made possible by Fotene Demoulas, a Boston-based philanthropist who is a collector and patron of women artists, and who values AWAW’s work. Another anonymous donor also contributed funds toward an additional award.
2024 Recipients:
Erica Baum (b. 1961, New York, NY) is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes and sewing patterns and magazines. She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984. Her work is held in numerous collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, SFMoMA, San Francisco, National Museum of Women in the Arts, CNAP Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, frac-île-de france, Paris and MAMCO, Geneva among others. In addition, she received a 2008 NYFA fellowship in Photography. She lives and works in New York.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter (b. 1981) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, writer, pedagogue, and cultural worker based in Philadelphia, PA. As a visionary thought leader creating socially conscious music, film, performance and visual art, her practice embodies resilience, care, and community-centeredness while working at the intersections of reproductive justice, black feminist thought and transformative change. She is an inaugural 2017 Right of Return fellow, 2018 and 2019 Mural Arts Philadelphia Reimagining Reentry fellow, 2019 Leeway Foundation Transformation fellow, 2021 Ed Trust Justice fellow, 2021 Frieze Impact Prize award winner, 2022 S.O.U.R.C.E Studio Corrina Mehiel Fellow, 2022 Art 4 Justice grantee partner, 2022 Pratt Forward fellow, 2022 Artist2Artist Art Matters Foundation grantee and grantor, and 2023 Soros Justice fellow. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA PS1, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, Frieze LA, Eastern State Penitentiary, Martos Gallery, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown University, the Schomburg, Yale Art Gallery, the National Museum of World Cultures Leiden, Two Rivers Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum, where she had a solo exhibition in 2023.

Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935, Boykin, AL) is an American contemporary artist renowned for her quilts, which marry her creative flair for improvisation with traditional quilting techniques. One of the best-known and most revered Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, Bendolph transforms worn and discarded clothing into highly refined geometric abstractions inspired by her personal experiences and the world around her. Highlights of her artistic career include having her 1998 Housetop variation quilt featured on a U.S. postage stamp as part of the American Treasures series in 2006 and, in 2015, receiving a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor for folk and traditional arts in the U.S. Bendolph’s work is held in the permanent collections of numerous art museums, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Tate Modern (London, UK), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA).
Natalie Bookchin, (b. 1962, New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist widely recognized for her innovative media artworks. Over the last four decades, her practice has encompassed photography, video, sound, CD-ROMs, installation, film, performance, net art, computer games, embroidery, drawing, hacktivist interventions, site-specific projects, creative writing and more. Bookchin’s artwork has been exhibited and screened widely including at MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Tate, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA LA, the Whitney Museum, the ICP Museum, the Kitchen, and La Virreina Center for the Image, Barcelona. She has received awards and fellowships from California Arts Council, the Guggenheim, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship the MacArthur Foundation, a NYSCA Individual Artist Fellowship, a NYSCA/MAAF award, a Bellagio Arts Fellowship, Yaddo, and McDowell Foundation, among others. Her artwork has been commissioned by the Tate, Creative Time, LACMA, and the Walker Art Center among others. Bookchin received her BA at SUNY Purchase, her MFA at the School of the Art institute of Chicago and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. She is a professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn.
Rashida Bumbray (b. 1978) Rashida Bumbray is a curator and choreographer. Her work in performance and video draws from Black vernacular and folk forms, including ring shouts, work songs, hoofing, and the blues—accessed through research, a lineage of Black women dancers, teachers, and ethnographers, and the architectures of improvisation, surrender, and possession. In pursuit of functional responses to displacement, erasure, and social forgetting, Bumbray creates intimate performances and restagings of sacred and secular underground rituals in the interest of transformation and liberation. She regularly collaborates with other artists, performers, and musicians, bringing forward personal and collective embodied archives and exploring the spaces between levity and groundedness. Bumbray is a United States Artist Fellow (2019) and was an Inaugural Civic Practice Artist-in-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017-2021). She recently received a Ruby’s Artist Grant and a Tate Infinities Commission R&D Awards. Her film “How High the Moon” is featured in Flight Into Egypt! at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her new performance work, “Way Down,” opened the exhibition’s Performance Pyramid series. Her works have been presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Black Star Film Festival, Project Row Houses, Dancing While Black, SummerStage, The Park Avenue Armory, Dia: Chelsea (with Leslie Hewitt), Tate Exchange (with Simone Leigh), The New Museum (with Simone Leigh), Whitney Museum of American Art (with Jason Moran & Alicia Hall Moran), and The 2015 Venice Biennale: All The World’s Futures (with Jason Moran & Alicia Hall Moran). Bumbray was nominated for the prestigious Bessie Award for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer” (2014). Her performance RUN MARY RUN in collaboration with Jason Moran and Dance Diaspora Collective was named among “Best Concerts of 2012,” by the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff.
Mary Ellen Carroll (b. 1961 Danville, IL) is a conceptual artist who occupies the disciplines of architecture, art, public policy, film/media, and technology and notably in the ongoing durational works — the opus prototype 180, PUBLIC UTILITY 2.0, and indestructible language on climate and migration. Carroll / MEC, studios’ experimentation and oeuvre spans over four decades in a range of media that transcend genres and is dedicated to a social/political critique that explores the interactions of subjectivity, language, and power/knowledge. A recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, American Academy in Berlin, Rockefeller Foundation, and Graham Foundation, and in 2022 a Prix de Rome Fellow among others. Teaching, lecturing and public presentations on the built environment, art, and public policy are an important part of Carroll’s work. She has lectured or taught at institutions including the Dia Art Foundation, Columbia University, American Academy in Berlin, Rice University, and Yale University, among others. Carroll’s work is in numerous public and private collections in the US and abroad. A major museum survey of her work curated by Rebecca Matalon for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will open in October 2025.
Robin Hill (b. 1955, Houston, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of sculpture, drawing, and photography, employing a vast array of materials including tumbleweeds, dryer lint, industrial washtubs, mica washers, linen fire hose, forest-fire charred wood, sunflowers, hand-made needlework, sheep wool, beach detritus, sun-worn pool flags, tree trunks felled by atmospheric rivers, bird nests, and oak galls. Her work strives to transform seemingly inconsequential matter into meaningful statements about matter itself, to give shape to nuance and to relocate familiar things in an unfamiliar order. While not overtly political, her attention to the emergent behaviors and materiality of the human and the non-human world attests to a form of eco-feminism, where her actions through/upon/with matter seek to serve as provocations for others to consider the role that wonder and attention play in repair and restoration, of the self, of the community, of the planet. Her work has been exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Hill is the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture, and a National Endowment for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship. Hill received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Collection of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, the Kramlich Collection, the Crocker Museum, the Achenbach Collection-Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, and the Yale University Art Gallery among others. She is on the faculty of the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California-Davis and divides her time between California’s Sacramento Valley, New York, and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942, Somerville, NJ) has been an activist in the feminist art movement since 1970, when she was a pioneer of the Pattern and Decoration movement and a founding member of the feminist collective Heresies. After a sustained commitment to public art throughout the 1980s and 1990s, completing 15 projects, she returned to a studio practice that encompasses painting, sculpture, installations, printmaking, collage, and photography. In recent years, she executed two new public works in glass mosaic and ceramic tile: “Parkside Portals,” at the 86th Street and Central Park West subway station in New York, 2018 for the MTA Art and Design Program and ”Memory and Time” for the new federal courthouse in Greenville, South Caroline, through the GSA’s Art in Architecture program, 2021. Kozloff’s work is included in numerous public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. She has received numerous awards, including a Rockefeller Bellagio grant, 1992; Rome Prize, American Academy, 1999; Guggenheim Foundation grant, 2004 and an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, her alma mater, 2015. She has been represented by the DC Moore Gallery in New York for 30 years.
Jen Liu (b. 1976, Smithtown, NY) is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, performance, and sculpture, on diasporic Asian identities, postcolonial economies, techno-/bio-politics, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. In her most recent work, she’s used genetic engineering and dark encryption to reframe firsthand accounts of electronics workers, and created semi-speculative scripts combining corporate brochures and industrial manuals with firsthand accounts of industrial workers and labor activists in Asia. Liu is a recipient of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commission, Creative Capital Grant, LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, and the Cornell Tech Art Award, among others. She has presented work at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, Sculpture Center, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthalle Wien, MUSAC Leon, KW Berlin, multiple Berlinale exhibitions at AdK, Royal Academy and ICA in London, and was included in the 2015 Shanghai Biennial, 2019 Singapore Biennial, 2023 Future of Today Biennial (Beijing), and the 2023 Taipei Biennial. She has also received multiple grants and residencies, including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Para Site, Hong Kong; Pioneer Works and LMCC in New York; and de ateliers, Amsterdam, NL.
Gladys Nilsson (b. 1940, Chicago) studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent Art Institute graduates (Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. In 1973, she became one of the first women to have a solo-exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nilsson is known for her densely layered and meticulously constructed watercolors and collages. Like many of the Hairy Who artists, Nilsson employed a type of horror vacui; many of her works feel filled to the brim with winding, playful imagery. Her work, centered on the figure, often focuses on aspects of human sexuality and its inherent contradictions. Since 1966, Nilsson’s work has been the subject of over 50 solo exhibitions, and is featured in the collections of major museums, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the S
Liz Phillips (b. 1951, Jersey City, NJ) is one of the pioneers of sound art and interactive installation. She first exhibited her interactive sound sculptures using radio frequency capacitance fields in 1969 at Bennington College. In 1970, at the age of nineteen, Phillips presented her Electronic Banquet at the Eighth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York. These dinners traveled to many venues,including the Kitchen (1971, 1981, 1999), and are still considered a part of her practice. In the 1980s Phillips began developing a series of site-specific wind pieces for the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation and Creative Time(1981), The Walker Art Center (1984) the Whitney Biennial (1985) . In 1974 at ArtPark she did her first field recording installation at the Niagara Gorge, many water-based installations followed including, “Fluid Sound” Kala Art Institute 1988, “Mersonic Illuminations” Ars Electronica (1991), The World Financial Center (1992), Echo Evolution “Wave Crossings,” Harvestworks on Governors Island, (2017, a collaboration with Annea Lockwood ,“The River Feeds Back” (2022) in Philadelphia and “Dyning in the Dovecote” at Caramoor (2022–present). In 1986 she began a series of dry rock gardens with an installation for Capps Street Project and the Whitney Museum, “Graphite Ground” with natural copper conductors. Phillip’s most recent garden installation was a collaboration with her daughter, the painter Heidi Howard, for the Queens Museum (2018–2020).
Liliana Porter (born 1941, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an artist whose work includes printmaking, painting, photography, video, installations, and theater. She has lived and worked in New York since 1964. Porter was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, the Tomas Francisco Prieto Award from the Real Casa de la Moneda in Madrid in 2023, and Premio Universitario de Cultura “400 Años” from the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina, 2016. Among other collections her work is included in Dia Foundation, New York; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France ; British Museum and Tate Modern in London, England; Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA; Museo Tamayo in México City; Museo de Bellas Artes, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (MALBA); Museo de Arte Moderno and Museo del Grabado in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain.Image: ALL THAT JAZZ (KNIFE EDGE/PLACES), 2023. Gallon glass jars, distilled water, imitation calfskin, thread, birch plywood, Wet and Wild Blush (BED OF ROSES) 36”X 108” X 24”
Shirley Tse (b. 1968, Hong Kong) lives and works in California. She has created sculptural interventions that interrogate notions of place, politics, and ecology. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. At the 58th Venice Biennale, Tse was the first female artist to represent Hong Kong in a solo exhibition. Her works are in the permanent collections of M+, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, New Museum, New York, Vancouver Art Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009), City of Los Angeles Individual Artists Fellowship (2009), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists Mid- Career Award (2012), International Sculpture Center Outstanding Educator Award (2023). Tse received her B. A. from Chinese University of Hong Kong and her M.F.A. from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena.
Takako Yamaguchi (b. 1952, Okayama, Japan) is a long-time resident of Los Angeles who was born and raised in Japan. She is known for her paintings that combine abstraction, representation and decoration, drawing on tropes of both Asian painting and Western modernism. She was featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Japan, Berlin, and Mexico City. She is a recipient of artist grants including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists (2024), Tree of Life Individual Artist Grant (2018), California Community Foundation / Getty Fellowship Grant (2008), Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2006) and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2004). Her work is in the collections of Musee d’art Moderne, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nevada Museum, Reno; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, Logan, Utah and The Buck Collection of the University of California, Irvine. Yamaguchi received her BA from Bates College, Lewiston, Maine and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Constantina Zavitsanos (b. 1977, Reading, PA) works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound and deals in debt, dependency, and other shared resources. They use the material processes and concepts of superposition, interference, occlusion, and transduction to blur sensing and feeling, knowing and seeing, contiguous and noncontiguous touch. They have exhibited at New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, Artists Space, Participant Inc., and Performance Space New York, and at Arika UK, Glasgow; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf. With Park McArthur, they wrote “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal, Women & Performance, (Routledge, 2013) and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). They co-organize the cross-disability arts events I Wanna Be With You Everywhere, and have received a Roy Lichtenstein Award in Visual Arts from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Zavitsanos lives and works in New York.

2025 Anonymous Was A Woman Awards
2025-11-19 08:00 - 2026-11-01 17:00
Anonymous Was A Woman awards $750,000 to 15 women artists over the age of 40, who each receive $50,000 in recognition of their work
The 2025 award follows AWAW’s landmark survey and symposium addressing the lives and careers of women artists
November 19, 2025—Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) today announced the recipients of its 2025 awards, recognizing 15 artists over the age of 40 who have made significant contributions while continuing to create new work. Each recipient receives an unrestricted award of $50,000. Founded in 1996 by artist Susan Unterberg, Anonymous Was A Woman supports woman-identifying artists at critical points in their lives and careers. The organization has awarded more than $8 million to over 300 artists since its inception. This year’s recipients range in age from 41 to 83, and include artists working in a variety of mediums across the U.S. Earlier this year, AWAW released the results of the Anonymous Was A Woman Artist Survey—a landmark study conducted in partnership with journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin and SMU DataArts—which synthesized responses from over 1200 artists to provide a nuanced portrait of the challenges and successes of women artists today. The findings were presented at Artists Speak: The Anonymous Was A Woman Symposium, a convening at New York University in April 2025 that brought together artists, curators, and advocates to discuss systemic inequities and strategies for change. “This year marks a moment of both reflection and action,” said Susan Unterberg, founder of AWAW. “The insights from our inaugural survey and symposium have deepened our understanding of what women artists need to thrive, and reaffirmed the urgency of continuing to provide direct, unrestricted support. At a moment when the arts and the rights of women are under threat, I’m honored to recognize this year’s extraordinary group of artists—each of whom expands the field in profound and original ways. I started Anonymous Was A Woman partially in response to the end of federal funding to individual artists. Nearly thirty years later, that same need motivates us to continue our work of uplifting women artists in mid-career.”
The 2025 Anonymous Was A Woman Award recipients are:
Candida Alvarez
Ambreen Butt
JoAnne Carson
Cecelia Condit
Lola Flash
Sonya Kelliher-Combs
Michelle Marcuse
Park McArthur
Nicole Miller
Narcissister
Dhara Rivera
Linda Stark
Kunié Sugiura
Hong-Ân Trương
Paula Wilson
