Judy Chicago: award winner 2026

Judy Chicago's (b. 1939, Chicago, USA) career spans almost six decades, during which time she has produced a prodigious body of art that has been exhibited all over the world. In the 1970s, she pioneered feminist art and feminist art education in a series of programs in southern California. She is best known for her monumental work, The Dinner Party, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization executed between 1974-79. Subsequent major bodies of work have addressed issues of birth and creation in the Birth Project; the construct of masculinity in PowerPlay; the horrors of genocide in the Holocaust Project, on which she collaborated with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman; and most recently, mortality and humankind’s relationship to and destruction of the Earth in The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, which debuted at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 2019. 

Over the course of her career, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art and to women's right to engage in the highest level of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol for people everywhere, known and respected for her work and life as models for a broader definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women's right to freedom of expression. In 2018 she was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” and Artsy magazine’s “Most Influential Artists”. In 2019, she received the Visionary Woman award from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and was an honoree at the annual Hammer Museum gala in Los Angeles. In 2020 she was feted by the Museum of Arts and Design at their annual MAD Ball. Since then, she has been the recipient of multiple honors and awards and her work continues to be shown internationally.