2025 Doris Duke Artist Awards

On May Day, the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) announced the six recipients of the 2025 Doris Duke Artist Awards – the largest prize in the United States that is dedicated to individual performing artists – and the launch of Creative Labor, Creative Conditions, a campaign and national network celebrating artists as creative laborers that includes $3M in grants towards building the financial and social conditions to help sustain professional artists.

This year’s Doris Duke Artist Awards honorees are:

• Trajal Harrell: Trajal is an American dancer and choreographer best known for a series entitled Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church. He is considered to be one of the most important choreographers working in contemporary dance today.
• Raja Feather Kelly: Raja is a Brooklyn-based choreographer known for his surrealist productions. He's worked on shows like Fairview and A Strange Loop, and he serves as artistic director for The Feath3r Theory and the New Brooklyn Theatre.
• Aya Ogawa: Aya is an award-winning Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer and translator. Their work explores cultural identity and the immigrant experience, challenging traditional notions of American aesthetics. They use a collaborative process and incorporate diverse perspectives and languages into their performances.
• Kassa Overall: Kassa is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions. He previously released four critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, Shades of Flu and Shades of Flu 2.
• Kaneza Schaal: Kaneza Schaal is a New York City–based artist working in theater, opera and film. Her notable work Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now was The Met's first live performance as an integral part of a major exhibition.
• Brandee Younger: Brandee is an American harpist who blends classical, jazz, soul and funk influences into her music. In 2022, she became the first Black woman nominated for a Grammy® Award for Best Instrumental Composition and won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album for Brand New Life.

Each artist is awarded $525,000 in unrestricted funds allocated over seven years and an incentive of up to $25,000 to save for retirement. Including the 2025 recipients, the foundation to date has provided nearly 150 artists with more than $40 million through the Doris Duke Artist Awards program.

Kaneza Schaal, one of the 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award recipients said, “The world is on fire right now—with big changes, fears and dangers, problems. When it comes to the work of imagining new worlds, new answers, new possibilities… we who work in performance—what we make is always a conversation, in a world so desperately in need of conversations, real exchanges. At its best, our work is a model of participatory society. The Doris Duke Foundation's support of our work, the work of democracy, of art, conversation and community, is an investment in building the world."