Lauren Levato Coyne Receives 2026 AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism
Lauren Levato Coyne
Cranbrook Academy of Art is proud to celebrate alumna Lauren Levato Coyne (MFA Painting 2020), who has been named the winner of the 2026 AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism. Presented by the International Association of Art Critics, United States Section, the award recognizes emerging voices making significant contributions to the field of art criticism and carries a prize of $2,500 USD.
In announcing the award, AICA-USA Managing Director Patrick Hill praised Levato Coyne’s interdisciplinary approach, noting that her work — published across U.S.-based and international venues — combines scientific observation, pedagogy, and ecology to create a space for thought and action to emerge and evolve. The selection committee recognized her writing as offering an opportunity to view art criticism not only as a productive force but as one of many generative, interconnected systems vital to human flourishing.
Levato Coyne is a writer, artist, and educator based in the Berkshires. Her art writing considers queerness, climate change, species loss, and the ecological imagination, with a particular focus on sculpture and installation. She came to art criticism after earning her MFA in Painting at Cranbrook, having previously worked as a daily news and features reporter, copy editor, and magazine editor. Her reviews and essays appear in publications including Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (UK), Boston Art Review, Sculpture Magazine, Gulf Coast Literary Journal, The Berkshire Eagle, and HEY! (France), among others.
Her writing has been recognized with a Toni Beauchamp Prize for Critical Arts Writing, a Rabkin Foundation travel grant, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and was selected as a 2025 Warhol Arts Writers Grant finalist.
Levato Coyne is currently the 2026 artist-in-residence at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst, where she is researching early modern perspectives on animals, ecology, and the Medusa myth. She teaches art in the Paleobiology and Oceanography departments at Williams College.
Learn more:
Lauren Levato Coyne, 2026 AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism – AICA USA
