Opportunities

The Burke Prize is a biannual contemporary art prize for a new generation of artists working in a world of expanded media with a foundation in glass, fiber, clay, metal, or wood. Selected by a diverse and distinguished jury of curators, artists, and scholars through an open-call application process, the Burke Prize winner receives an unrestricted award of $50,000.

One Burke Prize artist will also be selected for the biannual Burke Residency at The Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass. The Burke Residency artist will receive a one-month to five-week residency with all the benefits and opportunities awarded to artists selected for The Studio's Artist-in-Residence program.

Inspired by the disciplines that shaped the American studio craft movement, the Burke Prize is named for Marian and Russell Burke, two longtime supporters of MAD and passionate collectors of craft. Established in 2018, the Burke Prize honors exceptional artists, 45 or under, working in the United States, whose highly accomplished work is conceptually rigorous, relevant, and pushes the boundaries of materials and creative processes.

2025 Burke Prize Jurors

Andrew Gardner, Curator

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Curator and Director, NYC DOT Art

Selva Aparicio, 2023 Burke Prize winner

Previous Winners

Selva Aparicio (Spain, b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, originally from Barcelona. Her work, which spans installation and sculpture, explores themes of memory, death, intimacy, and mourning, drawing inspiration from the natural world’s cycles of life and death. Aparicio’s practice contrasts nature with contemporary life, investigating the dissonance between the two in the 21st century. Using materials such as reclaimed cemetery ephemera, cicada wings, plant seeds, and human hair, she combines traditional craft techniques—like weaving, carving, and sewing—to create pieces that celebrate the act of making by hand while questioning the fast-paced, technology-driven world around us.

Aparicio earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Yale Center for British Art; and the Can Mario Museum in Spain. She is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture-Mixed Media & Fibers at Alfred University in New York.

Charisse Pearlina Weston (United States, b. 1988) is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in profound material and symbolic investigations of the intimacies and interiors of Black life.  She utilizes glass to conceptually embody both the everyday risk of anti-Black violence and the precocity and malleability of Blackness in the face of this violence. Melding glass sculptures and photography with poetic fragments of Black experience, her work examines the interstices of Black interiors and intimacies. 

Weston received her MFA from the University of California-Irvine, an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, a BA from the University of North Texas, and completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center and Recess as well as group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and ArtPace, San Antonio.

Indira Allegra (United States, b. 1980) makes sculptures, performances, texts, and installations that investigate memorial practices and the unseen forces of generational trauma. She uses the ideology and methodology of weaving to explore the repetitive intersections of forces held under tension, be they material, social, or emotional. Allegra holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with high distinction, from California College of the Arts, where she studied visual studies, writing, and textile.  She also earned an Associate of Applied Science in Sign Language Interpretation from Portland Community College and studied biology at Yale University. She has received the Artadia Award (2018), Tosa Studio Award (2018), Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Artist Project Grant (2018), MAP Fund Grant (2018), and Windgate Craft Fellowship (2016), among other accolades.

Cannupa Hanska Luger (United States, b. 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and cut paper, he interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about twenty-first-century indigeneity. Using social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific issues, Luger produces multipronged projects that often present a call to action, provoking diverse publics to engage with indigenous peoples and values outside the lens of colonial social structuring. He lectures and participates in residencies around the globe, and his work is collected internationally.