VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography 2025

Open to U.S. citizens, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts launches the VMFA Aaron Siskind Award with two cash prizes of $25,000.

Overview

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is proud to celebrate Aaron Siskind's artistic legacy, support the practice of photography as a vital means of creative expression, and honor the role that the Aaron Siskind Foundation played in supporting photographers through the Individual Photographer’s Fellowship.

Addressed to early-to-mid-career artists as well as established photographers who have demonstrated a sustained commitment to their practice but who may not yet have received significant critical recognition, the award is meant to enable photographers to complete a meaningful body of work—whether the continuation or finalization of a photographic series; the development of an exhibition, monograph or book project; or another major creative endeavor.

The jury is composed of Kaitlin Booher (William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography, Columbus Museum of Art), Brendan Embser (Senior Editor, Aperture), and Carla Williams (Photographer, Archivist, and Scholar).

Practical Info

To enter the VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography, applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents and consider photography their primary vocation.  Artists working with still photo-based media are welcome to apply.

The application requires basic profile information, a curriculum vitae and an artist statement. The artist statement should describe the applicant’s artistic practice and provide details about the project or body of work the award would support. A portfolio of 10 to 15 images must be submitted, with all work created within the past seven years (2018–present); one of the images may be a book maquette in PDF format. Both analog and digital photography are accepted. If Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used, it must not be the primary creative input, and any use must be fully disclosed in the artist statement, including the non-AI processes involved.

About Aaron Siskind Collection at VMFA

In 2020, VMFA received an extraordinary gift of more than 8,000 photographs by Aaron Siskind from the Aaron Siskind Foundation in New York. Established by the artist in 1984, the foundation's mission was to preserve and protect Siskind's artistic legacy, as well as to foster knowledge and appreciation for photography through research, publications, exhibitions and an annual fellowship prize for individual photographers. When the foundation dissolved its operations in 2020, it sought to transfer the collection to an American art museum that would be willing to administer the annual fellowship prize and care for, interpret and display the foundation's core collection of Siskind's photographs. VMFA was awarded this major gift as a result of the museum's demonstrated commitment to photography and its outstanding fellowship program.