The .ART Registry has opened submissions for the inaugural .ART Award 2026, a global prize for artists working in any medium. The award marks ten years since the launch of the .ART top-level domain in 2016 and carries more than USD 50,000 in total prize value. Submissions close on 1 November 2026.

.ART is a top-level domain built for the art world. It was launched in 2016, and more than 315,000 artists, galleries, museums, and cultural institutions have registered an address on it since. 

The .ART award departs from the standard open-call format in one respect. Applicants do not upload a portfolio. Each artist instead submits the URL of a .ART domain they own, pointing to wherever their practice already lives online. That destination can be a full website, an existing portfolio on another platform, or a social profile. The jury reads every application in the context the artist has built, rather than in a submission template.

That structure follows from what the .ART award sets out to reward. Alongside the finished work, the jury considers the documentation around it: the artist's biography, the account of how a piece came to be, the materials and decisions behind it, and any supporting record of process. “The main prize is not money, but the act of an artist organizing and articulating their own context,” says Ulvi Kasimov, founder of .ART. “In that sense, every participant will receive the main prize.”

Entry carries no requirement of gallery representation, exhibition history or a formal CV, and the .ART award is open on identical terms to artists in every region. For practitioners working outside the main market centres, whose record often sits on their own site rather than in an institutional archive, that puts the emphasis on what an artist has actually documented.

The requirements are set out in four parts. A biography of at least 100 words covering the artist's practice and background. Images, video or 3D models of the work, with captions and technical detail such as medium, materials and dimensions. A written account of at least 200 words, or a video of at least a minute, describing how the work came about, its materials, inspiration and the personal or cultural context it sits in. Supplementary material such as sketches, process footage or notes is recorded where present, and is not required.

The prize pool is led by a USD 15,000 cash grand prize. Two artist residencies are also on offer: one at Château du Fresne in Bourgogne, France, a working residency housed in a listed château where contemporary commissions sit alongside seventeenth-century interiors, and one at Anfitrion in Marbella, Spain. Winners additionally receive editorial coverage in Whitewall Magazine and a premium .ART domain.

The .ART award also marks a shift in where .ART sits. For a decade the registry sponsored the Digital Innovation in Arts and Culture category at Investor Allstars, the venture awards convened by GP Bullhound. This is the first prize it has launched from inside the art world itself.

The jury numbers ten. It includes Akanksha Ballaney, senior director of business development at Artsy and Artnet; Regina Harsanyi, media arts curator at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York; Sasha Stiles, the Kalmyk-American poet and artist; Irina Tarsis, founder and director of the Center for Art Law; Dean Phelus of the American Alliance of Museums; and Gijs Stork, co-founder of the Château du Fresne residency, alongside Laurent Moïsi, Shlomi Rabi and Leo Crane.

Stiles, whose monumental text work A Living Poem has shown at MoMA and who co-founded the digital poetry platform theVERSEverse, treats her own archive as a working part of her practice. "My training data set is, in one way, an archive of my writings. But it's a very active, dynamic archive that I'm always evolving," she said. "Having different timestamps of what that looks like at different moments in my life is interesting for me. It's like going back and looking at a diary."

More than 700 submissions have been received to date. The .ART award is open to artists and collectives aged 18 and over, working anywhere in the world and in any art form, from painting and sculpture through performance, video, installation and digital practice. Semi-finalists will be announced on 6 November 2026 and finalists on 20 November, with the winners revealed during Art Basel Miami on 3 December.

Full details and submissions at www.award.art.