The 2026 Doris Duke Artist Awards were announced today, and half of its six recipients work in the realm of jazz and improvised music. They are the turntablist, percussionist and scholar Val Jeanty; drummer, bandleader and producer Makaya McCraven; and cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.
Established in 2012, the Doris Duke Artist Awards are often described as the nation’s largest prize dedicated to individual performing artists. Each awardee will receive $525,000 in unrestricted funds — allocated over seven years, with a $25,000 incentive for those who allocate funds for retirement. There are also extra-monetary means of support, as Dr. Ashley Ferro-Murray, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s program director for the arts, explained in an interview last year.
“We do more than just give a grant,” Dr. Ferro-Murray told WRTI. “We get this incredible opportunity as a foundation to gather these artists together in the same space. They are given other kinds of resources: professional development resources, financial literacy resources, and things like that. Witnessing all of these artists coming together in the same room, you already sort of feel that kind of creative energy and overlapping bubble. It’s an added perk and benefit to watch when individual artists who meet through this program do find relationships, either personal or professional, out of it.”
The three other new Doris Duke Artists are Aleshea Harris, a dramatist whose play On Sugarland was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2023; Allison Orr, founder of Forklift Danceworks, which honors the movements of workers; and Yara Travieso, self-described as a “Cuban-Venezuelan-American anti-disciplinary artist working across performance, film, and ritual.”
Each of the new Doris Duke Artists comes with previous accolades. Reid — who joined us for a recent episode of The Late Set — is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, and a 2021 United States Artist Fellow. Jeanty, aka Val-Inc, is also a United States Artist Fellow, and has received several other fellowships and grants. McCraven, whose albums have topped a number of polls, also won “International Drums/Percussion” at the 2023 Deutscher Jazzpreis (German Jazz Prize).
“The Doris Duke Artist Awards program is more than an award,” Dr. Ashley Ferro-Murray, its program director for the arts, says in a statement. “It is the realization of our commitment to the essential investments our society must make in sustaining, cultivating and celebrating creative labor as a necessary pillar of our communities and country.”
In addition to the six Doris Duke Artist Awards, the Foundation awarded more than $1 million in grants to “six organizations working to build a more sustainable and equitable ecosystem for artists.” These include Starfish Accelerator Foundation and Artist Corporations Foundation.
For more information about the Doris Duke Artists Awards, visit the Foundation website.
