The shortlisted artists for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards have been revealed for 2026.
The annual Arts Foundation Futures Awards support the UK’s most promising artists and creatives in film, literature, music, theatre, and the visual arts with a total of £115,000 in unconditional grants.
This includes five transformative £20,000 fellowships, and all shortlisted receiving £1,000 towards the development of their practice.
The awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday, February 2nd in London.
Ahead of the awards ceremony, the filmmakers shortlisted will screen their work and be part of a Q&A at the ICA in London on Tuesday, January 27th.
Film
Dorothy Allen-Pickard works across narrative, documentary and theatrical modes of filmmaking, and her collaborative approach is often inspired by her protagonists’ lived experiences.
Jessi Gutch is an award-winning writer/director interested in reflexive films about big political ideas that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Myrid Carten uses documentary and fiction to interrogate both the struggle for intimacy and the ways we are compromised by our pasts.
Alice Russell is a documentary filmmaker who works with outlaws and romantic rebels, outsiders who are agents of change.
Literature
The annual Arts Foundation Futures Awards support the UK’s most promising artists and creatives in film, literature, music, theatre, and the visual arts with a total of £115,000 in unconditional grants.
This includes five transformative £20,000 fellowships, and all shortlisted receiving £1,000 towards the development of their practice.
The awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday, February 2nd in London.
Ahead of the awards ceremony, the filmmakers shortlisted will screen their work and be part of a Q&A at the ICA in London on Tuesday, January 27th.
Film
Dorothy Allen-Pickard works across narrative, documentary and theatrical modes of filmmaking, and her collaborative approach is often inspired by her protagonists’ lived experiences.
Jessi Gutch is an award-winning writer/director interested in reflexive films about big political ideas that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Myrid Carten uses documentary and fiction to interrogate both the struggle for intimacy and the ways we are compromised by our pasts.
Alice Russell is a documentary filmmaker who works with outlaws and romantic rebels, outsiders who are agents of change.
Literature
Fahad Al-Amoudi is an alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation and a graduate of the Writing Squad. His work is published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Wasafiri, The London Magazine, and Mizna.
Lucy Mercer makes poems as visual works, often exploring the relation of text to image through creative practice, research and curation.
Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian poet, facilitator, and journalist., Her practice spans page and video poetry, collaborative performance, and erasure poetry.
Camille Ralphs is a poet, critic and editor. Her first collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, was published by Faber in the UK (2024) and McSweeney’s in the US (2025), where she recently completed a three-week reading tour.
Music
Nneka Cummins is a composer and producer, their practice has a focus on groove-inspired music which uses extended techniques to add colour and percussiveness and explores the idea of deconstruction and re-examination through sampled electronics.
William Marsey is a UK-based composer. His music has been described as vivid, unsettling, distinctive and strangely touching.
Cassie Kinoshi is a is a Berlin/London-based composer, arranger and alto-saxophonist with a focus on creating multidisciplinary and genre-blending performance work across contemporary classical music, jazz/improvised music, film, television and visual-art contexts.
Sasha Scott is a composer, electronic artist and violinist born and based in London. Her work moves between acoustic and electronic, often merging the two to create hypnotic, dark, metallic sound worlds that blur the lines between the organic and the synthetic.
Theatre
Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu is a British-Ghanaian theatremaker whose work stretches the imagination of his audiences with his unique brand of storytelling.
Craig McCorquodale is a director based in Glasgow, pushing theatre into public space and public space back into the theatre. Often working with local people rather than actors, his projects ask us to look more closely at the people we share our streets with.
Annie Kershaw is a Theatre Director who strives to make striking, innovative and accessible theatre. She is often drawn to stories that are led by queer and/or female characters.
Hannah Noone is a theatre and opera director whose practice is rooted in building work collaboratively, finding and holding onto authenticity through discovery with performers and communities.
Visual Art
Mark Corfield-Moore is a painter who utilises textile techniques, in his practice he reflects on his Thai and British heritage to investigate themes of transience and cultural memory.
Jesse Pollock's sculptural practice is rooted in the exploration of material, tradition, and the contradictions of contemporary rural life.
Zein Majali is a Jordanian-Palestinian sound and visual artist whose work explores the collision of technology with a rapidly evolving political landscape, with an interest in a post-colonial and globalised Middle East.
Shaqúelle Whyte's paintings present imagined spaces imbued with a sense of ambiguity that interrogate the human condition, all the while exploring the material qualities of the medium.
Lucy Mercer makes poems as visual works, often exploring the relation of text to image through creative practice, research and curation.
Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian poet, facilitator, and journalist., Her practice spans page and video poetry, collaborative performance, and erasure poetry.
Camille Ralphs is a poet, critic and editor. Her first collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, was published by Faber in the UK (2024) and McSweeney’s in the US (2025), where she recently completed a three-week reading tour.
Music
Nneka Cummins is a composer and producer, their practice has a focus on groove-inspired music which uses extended techniques to add colour and percussiveness and explores the idea of deconstruction and re-examination through sampled electronics.
William Marsey is a UK-based composer. His music has been described as vivid, unsettling, distinctive and strangely touching.
Cassie Kinoshi is a is a Berlin/London-based composer, arranger and alto-saxophonist with a focus on creating multidisciplinary and genre-blending performance work across contemporary classical music, jazz/improvised music, film, television and visual-art contexts.
Sasha Scott is a composer, electronic artist and violinist born and based in London. Her work moves between acoustic and electronic, often merging the two to create hypnotic, dark, metallic sound worlds that blur the lines between the organic and the synthetic.
Theatre
Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu is a British-Ghanaian theatremaker whose work stretches the imagination of his audiences with his unique brand of storytelling.
Craig McCorquodale is a director based in Glasgow, pushing theatre into public space and public space back into the theatre. Often working with local people rather than actors, his projects ask us to look more closely at the people we share our streets with.
Annie Kershaw is a Theatre Director who strives to make striking, innovative and accessible theatre. She is often drawn to stories that are led by queer and/or female characters.
Hannah Noone is a theatre and opera director whose practice is rooted in building work collaboratively, finding and holding onto authenticity through discovery with performers and communities.
Visual Art
Mark Corfield-Moore is a painter who utilises textile techniques, in his practice he reflects on his Thai and British heritage to investigate themes of transience and cultural memory.
Jesse Pollock's sculptural practice is rooted in the exploration of material, tradition, and the contradictions of contemporary rural life.
Zein Majali is a Jordanian-Palestinian sound and visual artist whose work explores the collision of technology with a rapidly evolving political landscape, with an interest in a post-colonial and globalised Middle East.
Shaqúelle Whyte's paintings present imagined spaces imbued with a sense of ambiguity that interrogate the human condition, all the while exploring the material qualities of the medium.