Doris Duke Foundation Announces 2025 Artist Awards and Mobilizes National Network to Protect Creative Labor
Times Square photo collage.
Today, 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.
The Doris Duke Artist Awards are more than an award—they are an emblem of the role of artists in protecting a free and open society. These artists exemplify our commitment to the essential investments our society must make in sustaining creative labor.”
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."
The Labor Movement
This year, the Doris Duke Foundation intentionally announced the Artist Awards recipients on May Day—a day honoring the struggles and achievements of the international labor movement—to affirm that artists are workers. By celebrating artists as creative laborers, DDF underscores how society thrives when artists have resources, compensation and the support they need to live and work. With a $6.3M investment, DDF is reaffirming its commitment to the performing arts through the national Creative Labor, Creative Conditions campaign, which includes:
- $1.5M to the United States Artists for their national policy alliance and financial literacy trainings for artists.
- A $1.5M partnership with the Center for Cultural Innovation on a national policy initiative that ensures artists are included in labor protections.
- Arts policy convenings in Washington, D.C. with DCJazz (summer 2025) and in Colorado with Aspen Art Museum as part of their 2025 Investing In Artists As Leaders initiative.
- A growing network of national partners dedicated to advancing equitable wages for artists, growing healthy communities with thriving cultural sectors and creating affordable spaces for performing artists to develop and produce work.
United States Artists (USA) and the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) are nonprofits that help individual artists build sustainable careers and, more broadly, work to improve the social and financial infrastructure that allows artists and other freelancers to be creatively and financially successful in the long term. Through expanded technical assistance, financial services and direct support via USA programs and the National Arts Policy Alliance, DDF is equipping the organization’s member artists with tools to navigate a shifting policy landscape and preserve their long-term financial health.
The independence and freedom necessary for an artist to roam, to imagine and to create visionary work, can leave those very artists vulnerable to being excluded from the protections and benefits awarded to those in stable and consistent environments of care.”
“As cultural laborers, we want to understand these challenges and create systems to accommodate resources for artists, not just because they’ve created beauty in the world but because this care is inalienable to all people.” “A healthy democracy needs artists, yet artists are silenced when they struggle financially, are encumbered by debt or are losing housing. Everyone should be freely expressive, yet these kinds of struggles hold back too many people. We are excited to be working together on solutions for unharnessing artists’ potential in ways that benefit everyone in society." — Angie Kim, President & CEO, Center for Cultural Innovation and Founding Director of its Research to Impact Lab.
The campaign kicks off on May 1 in Times Square with a multidisciplinary performance and large-scale choral activation, alongside partners. In addition to USA and CCI, partners include One Nation, One Project, Creatives Rebuild NY, and IndieSpace. As part of the effort, DDF will host two additional convenings with cross-sector leaders and artists between May Day and Labor Day in Aspen, Colorado and Washington, DC.
Established in 2012, the Doris Duke Artist Awards aim to create conditions for individual artists so they can thrive. In addition to providing a cash prize, the foundation also gives the award winners support including professional development, financial planning and management services, enhanced networking and performance opportunities. The unrestricted nature of the award allows artists to use the funds for either personal or professional needs and enjoy the freedom to pursue projects of their choosing. In 2023, the foundation doubled the amount of the award to signal the power of sustained support for individual performing artists.
