We are delighted to announce that our nominators have shortlisted ten artists for the 2026 Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer. Each year, this prize identifies the extraordinary achievements of an emerging photographer whose recent work has garnered wider visibility and whose distinctive voice contributes fresh perspectives to the ongoing dialogue surrounding photography and visual culture. The winner receives a $10,000 award, the CPW Vision Award for Emerging Photographer, and a solo exhibition of their work at CPW.
The Saltzman Prize was created in 2024 by CPW Trustee Lisa Saltzman, in collaboration with CPW, to honor emerging photographers and to pay tribute to her parents Ralph and Muriel Saltzman, passionate collectors and devoted arts patrons. Last year’s winner, Qiana Mestrich, will open an exhibition of her work titled Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate at CPW on January 31, 2026.
“My collaboration with CPW on the Saltzman Prize has been really gratifying,” said Lisa Saltzman. “The nominated artists and winners have been exceptional. This year’s list of nominators are also quite strong and I know we will choose an exceptionally talented artist. I am glad I can do this for so many deserving artists, I know it means a lot to them and it means a lot to me.”
The ten shortlisted artists for 2026 were chosen by nominators Bhooma Padmanabhan, curator; Yancey Richardson, gallerist; Stephanie Syduco, artist and educator; Kristen Lubben, executive director, Magnum Foundation; and Philip Gefter, author, photography critic, and journalist. Click on the artist’s names to view their work!
Meet the Ten Artists Shortlisted for the 2026 CPW Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer:
Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. Bogotá, Colombia) (they/he) is a trans visual artist, educator, and curator who explores queer kinship through photographs, site-specific installations, and public programming. Their work is rooted in dialogue and collaboration with trans and queer friends and peers, many of whom are performers, artists, policymakers, and community organizers. Their practice celebrates collective care and intergenerational connection, emphasizing long-term, interdisciplinary collaborations that are non-hierarchical and equitable. Ariza’s work has recently been exhibited at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia; Espacio Odeón, Bogotá, Colombia; Lisson Gallery, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, CA; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, San José, CA. Selected awards include the 2025 Art Basel Medallist Award (with Art Handlxrs), the 2024 SF Pride Creativity Award, the 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award, the 2021 CAC Established Artist Award, the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award, and the 2017 Tosa Studio Award. Ariza is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts and the co-founder of Art Handlxrs. They serve on the board of El/La Para Trans Latinas and have been a member of The Transgender District’s Community Advisory.
Aishwarya Arumbakkam (b. 1988) is a visual artist who works across photography, video, and drawing. Photography shapes her connection to the physical world, tethering her to things that worry and excite her, that she longs for, and wants to hold on to. The documentary process is a strong element in her practice, functioning as an essential starting point from which different modes of expression grow. Arumbakkam graduated with an MFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas, Austin. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at Pathshala, Dhaka. She was named one of the British Journal of Photography’s ‘Ones to Watch’ in 2019 and received the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellowship in 2020. She lives and works in Chennai, India. Select solo and group exhibitions include work exhibited at Vaanyerum Vizhuthugal: Roots that Reach for the Sky Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bangalore (2025); Artists for Artists Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2025); LINES (01/06/2020 – 31/08/2020) Testsite, Austin (2023); ka Diengiei The South London Gallery (2022); Ten sounds I cannot hear and Connective Tissues: printed & published The Visual Arts Center, Austin (2022, 2020); and Growing Like a Tree Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2021), among others.
Sridhar Balasubramaniyam is an Indian visual based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. His artistic practice with photography and video explores the intricate relationship between body and land. Drawing on over 10 years of experience as a performance artist and photographer in theatres across various cities, Sridhar’s work reflects a deep engagement with Dravidian folk stories, performances, and tribal weddings. His acclaimed project, “Body and Land,” has earned significant recognition, including the Alkazi Theatre Photography Grant in 2020 and the Serendipity Photography Grant (2020). This work was exhibited at the Alkazi Theatre Archives in 2022 and featured at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2024. World press photography nomination 2025. finalist for Kg+ 2026.
Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Ayiti) is a multi disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and BA in studio art from the City College of New York. She is the recipient of a 2026 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a 2026 Light Work artist in residence. Cadet’s debut monograph was published by Black Mountains Studio and was a shortlisted for the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards. Cadet was a 2021–2022 visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and a 2020–2021 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2020, she was a recipient of the NYFA/JGS Fellowship in Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize. She was also a 2019 Syracuse University VPA Turner artist-in-residence, a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellow, and a 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist-in-residence. In 2013, she received the Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship. Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, FOAM, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Financial Times, Frieze, Artforum, and Wallpaper, among others. Cadet has exhibited both in the U.S. and internationally. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
Jenny Calivas is an artist who works with photography and performance. Based in Los Angeles, she makes her photographic work using analog processes and experimental darkroom techniques, prioritizing embodied ways of thinking and making. Her recent work consists of performative self-portraits as well as darkroom collages which investigate issues of agency and gender in relation to photography and to the natural environment. She holds her MFA degree from Yale University and her undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College. Her work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Light Work in Syracuse, NY; Yancey Richardson in New York City; Huxley Parlour in London and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME. Recent publications that feature her work include Aperture Magazine (Fall 2024) and an artist publication put out by New Poetics of Labor (2023). Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Gund Art Museum.
Kerr Cirilo was born in Paniqui, Tarlac, Philippines and grew up on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. He holds a B.A. in Religion and Studio Art from Whitman College and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. While deeply influenced by his experiences as a first-generation, queer, immigrant of color, his practice moves beyond identity lone to critique the structures of power that shape it. His core concerns are that of the image and its entanglements with empire. An upbringing in the 50th state was formative in his understanding of nation, citizenship, and what it means to belong.
Destiny Mata is a Mexican American photographer and filmmaker based in her native New York City. Focusing on subculture and community, she comes from a family of photographers: Her grandfather was a wedding photographer, her aunt Chayo Mata, a fashion photographer, and her mother documented family moments, instilling in her the power of photography from an early age. Mata found her creative voice as a photographer capturing live music, the everyday life of her Lower East Side neighborhood, and stories of home. Her work explores themes of gentrification, housing rights, and the underground New York City punks of color music scene. Mata studied photojournalism at LaGuardia Community College and San Antonio College, before serving as Director of Photography Programs at the Lower Eastside Girls Club from 2017 to 2019. Her work has been widely exhibited, including her solo exhibition Destiny Mata Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive at Abrons Art Center (2025); La Vida en Loisaida: Life on the Lower East Side at Photoville Festival, presented at Abrons Art Center (2020); and her solo exhibition PULSE at Transmitter Gallery in 2024. Her first book, The Way We Were, dedicated to New York City punks of color, was published by The Culture Crush in 2021. She was the recipient of the En Foco Artist Fellowship Award 2025, a Magnum Foundation Fellow in 2023, WORTHLESSSTUDIOS Photo Residency in 2022, and received the Magnum Foundation: US Dispatches grant in 2020. Rooted in the Lower East Side, Mata continues to preserve and celebrate her community through collaborative storytelling.
Chloe Scout Nix is an artist and performer originally from Waxahachie, Texas, but now based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Master in Photography from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Visual Arts, with a minor in Art History, from Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX.) Her conceptual practice explores performative intimacy through acts of performing for the camera, often resulting in self-portraiture. Preoccupied with how women’s bodies are consumed as narrative material within film and photography, she turns these tropes onto herself and questions what it means for her to wear certain characters. Nix is the recipient of the Dallas Museum of Art’s Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award (2019) and the Standard Club Award That Makes a Difference (2018). Her 2024 MFA thesis exhibition, sorry for the mess, curated by Jody Graf, was presented at the Pratt Photography Gallery in Brooklyn, with selected works also exhibited at Clamp Gallery in Chelsea as part of Everything Is Something, curated by Allen Frame. In 2025, she presented a solo exhibition of new work created after her masters program, i will kill your daddy, at Zeke’s Projects in Dallas, Texas. She is currently working as an art handler at MoMA PS1, and works in production at Primary Photographic, a film processing lab on the Lower East Side.
Daniel Rampulla is a Brooklyn-based photographer who deploys a variety of cameras—primarily black and white film—to capture the people, landscapes, and animals closest to him. His practice is rooted in observation, sensitivity, and memory, and is implicitly queer, with themes of identity, desire, and belonging as a central thread. His photographs and their subjects act as surrogates of subconscious memories and forecasts of memories to come. Photography is the medium through which he remembers the past, experiences the present, and anticipates the future. Rampulla was born in San Francisco, California, where he received a Bachelors of Fine Art in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. He holds a Masters in Art Education from New York University. He has published two books of photography: Augury (Forma Editions, 2023) and Wild Place (Pomegranate Press and Handshake Books, 2023). His solo exhibitions include Wild Place (Chart Gallery, New York, 2020) and Collapse (Kapp Kapp Gallery, Philadelphia, 2021). In 2024 Saint Laurent published a zine of Rampulla’s photographs in conjunction with simultaneous exhibitions in Paris and Los Angeles. He is the key art photographer for Broadway’s Oh, Mary!, having photographed every cast member since the show’s Off-Broadway debut in 2024.
Cinthya Santos Briones is an interdisciplinary artist, visual researcher, and educator of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York. Her practice explores migration, memory, spirituality, and resistance from a decolonial feminist perspective, using photography, archival research, text, and community-based textile practices. With a background in ethnohistory and anthropology, she worked for a decade at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), researching Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine. Cinthya holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Photography from Ithaca College and a Certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is currently a faculty member in the Studio Arts Practice MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and serves as Assistant Director at the Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY. She has also been a guest artist at Columbia University and Rutgers University. Her projects—Abuelas, Spaces of Detention, Migrant Herbalism, among others—have received support from Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Women, the Mellon Foundation, Wave Hill, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, BRIC, and El Museo del Barrio. In 2023, she participated in the Museum of the City of New York’s Photography Triennial with her project Living in Sanctuary. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, The Intercept, Open Society Foundations, NACLA, The Nation, and La Jornada. She has facilitated community workshops on alternative photographic processes at The Met, MoMA PS1, Worthless Studios, Photoville, and BRIC. She is co-author of the book, The Indigenous Worldview and Its Representations in Textiles of the NahuaCommunity of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo and co-director of the documentary The Huichapan Codex. She has also served as a community organizer advocating for immigrants’ rights, supporting asylum processes and guardianship cases for unaccompanied migrant minors.
Congratulations, each and all! And stay tuned to this space, our social media, and our website to learn who the winner will be!