Meriem Bennani and Daniel Joseph Martinez receive the 2026 Lawrence awards

American Academy of Arts and Letters gave its Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award to Meriem Bennani and its Jacob Lawrence Award to Daniel Joseph Martinez. The Academy announced the winners in March and presented the awards at its annual Ceremonial in New York on May 20, 2026. Each award carries $10,000 and recognizes outstanding achievement in the visual arts.

Meriem Bennani

Bennani was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1988 and lives in Brooklyn. She works across video, animation, sound, sculpture, and large installations, and she uses humor and magical realism in stories that take up life in North Africa, migration, gender, and religion. She earned her BFA at The Cooper Union in 2012. Bouchra, the animated feature she made with her longtime collaborator Orian Barki, won the Gold Q-Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2025.

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Martinez was born in Los Angeles in 1957 and earned his BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. For more than four decades he has made sculpture, video, text, and street performance that question the social and political rules people live by. His work appeared in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and he has taught generations of artists, including as a professor of art at the University of California, Irvine, since 1990. The Hammer Museum gave him its Career Achievement Award in 2018.

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