Honours to be presented at the inaugural edition of LIBERATUM ART & CINEMA, staged during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in celebration of Liberatum’s twenty-fifth anniversary

Liberatum is delighted to announce that its 2026 Pioneer Awards will be presented to Serbian artist Marina Abramović, American filmmaker Lee Daniels and Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, in recognition of work that has challenged convention, broken down systemic barriers, expanded artistic boundaries, redefined the possibilities of their respective fields and promoted the importance of preserving human dignity. 

The presentation will take place 6–7 September 2026 as part of LIBERATUM ART & CINEMA, a new multidisciplinary programme staged during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival and launched to mark the cultural diplomacy organisation’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

The Pioneer Award is presented by Liberatum to individuals whose practice has expanded the language of their discipline and altered how audiences understand and see it. This year’s recipients were selected for the singularity of their contributions to social change, art, cinema and culture, and for a shared willingness, across careers spanning five decades, to place difficult material such as the body, the state, memory, migration, race and war at the centre of major public attention.

The award was first given in 2023, in Salvador, Brazil, to Angela Bassett and Brazilian anthropologist and activist Ivete Sacramento. In 2024, Liberatum presented the Pioneer Award to Ellen Burstyn in Venice, marking her first ever visit to the Venice Film Festival, at Liberatum’s invitation. This year, the Festival will present Burstyn with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

LIBERATUM AT 25: A QUARTER-CENTURY OF CULTURAL COURAGE

Founded in 2001, Liberatum has spent twenty-five years at the intersection of culture, ideas, purpose, global dialogue and social good convening some of the world’s most celebrated visionaries to raise consciousness through the cultural lens on important issues facing humanity. From Nobel laureates and Academy Award winners to pioneering visual artists, filmmakers, athletes, architects, and musicians, past participants have included Sir VS Naipaul, Nicole Kidman, Frank Gehry, Pelé, Will Smith, Viola Davis, Tracey Emin, Marianne Faithfull and Sir David Attenborough.

Over two and a half decades, Liberatum has created wide-ranging, multidimensional cultural programmes across five continents, with its flagship festivals open to the public free of charge, building a strong community of artists, thinkers, change-makers, audiences and patrons united by the belief that culture is the highest form of human communication, and that its freedom must be passionately defended.

This year’s Pioneer Award recipients extend that history. Each was selected not for a single achievement but for a body of work built, at critical junctures, on the harder and less certain path, evidence that doing so can move a whole field forward.

THE 2026 LIBERATUM PIONEER AWARD RECIPIENTS

Marina Abramović is recognised for her remarkable artistry that has, since the 1970s, established performance art as a discipline in its own right and expanded its vocabulary further than any of her contemporaries. Abramović’s practice has repeatedly used duration, presence and physical risk to examine the relationship between artist and audience, and her influence now extends well beyond performance art into the wider language of contemporary visual culture. This year, she became the first living woman artist to be honoured with a major solo exhibition at Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia, in its more than 250-year history. Her selection reflects Liberatum’s long-standing interest in artists who have made the body itself a site of meaning.

Lee Daniels is recognised for bold, uncompromising filmmaking that has consistently brought subjects largely absent from mainstream American film and television into major public view, including Precious, The Butler and Empire. Daniels’ insistence on depicting Black life, trauma, sexuality and family with candour, at scale and without dilution, has opened space within the industry for narratives previously considered commercially untenable. His selection reflects Liberatum’s recognition of filmmakers who have used popular form to carry unpopular truths.

Nadine Labaki is recognised for a body of work including Capernaum and Where Do We Go Now? that has carried stories from Lebanon and the wider Middle East to international audiences on their own terms. Labaki’s films combine documentary rigour with narrative craft to address displacement, poverty and conflict without sentimentality, and have positioned her among the most significant filmmakers working from the region today. Her selection reflects Liberatum’s continued commitment to voices that use cinema as an instrument of witness to promote empathy and social change.

The 2026 Pioneer Awards have been designed by British-Russian artist Svetlana K-Liée whose practice spans sculpture and works on paper including porcelain, bronze, ceramics and etching. A member of the Union of Artists and an MA graduate in Drawing from the University of the Arts London, she has held residencies at the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and, in recent years, Taoxichuan in Jingdezhen, China.

LIBERATUM ART & CINEMA

The Pioneer Award presentation forms the centrepiece of LIBERATUM ART & CINEMA, the inaugural edition of Liberatum’s new multidisciplinary programme bringing together artists, filmmakers and cultural figures during the Venice Film Festival. 

Conceived to mark the organisation’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the programme extends Liberatum’s long-standing work in cultural diplomacy into a dedicated platform for the intersection of visual art and cinema. Spanish actress and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for cultural diversity Rossy de Palma will take part in the artistic programme among other international voices from Colombia to the United States.

The full programme including venue, participants, sessions, screenings and further detail on the Award presentation will be announced in late-August 2026 and published on the official Liberatum website liberatum.org