Samia Halaby Receives Munch Award for Artistic Freedom
160Sept. 17, 2025
Palestinian artist, educator, and activist Samia Halaby has been announced as the recipient of this year’sMunch Awardcelebrating artistic freedom. Inaugurated last year, the honor is presented annually by Munch—an Oslo museum devoted to the work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch—in recognition of artists’ sustained courage and integrity in the face of political and social pressures, something which Munch championed during his lifetime. The laurel includes a £20,000 ($27,000) monetary prize. Halaby is the second artist to win the award, after Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, who was honored in 2024 for her commitment to examining themes of violence bound up in race and gender.
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby, who lives and works in New York, is known primarily as a painter but has also made major contributions to the field of digital art. A longtime art educator, she has a storied history of resisting and actively demonstrating against injustices connected to class, gender, and race and has long sought to bring attention to the plight of Palestine.
Halaby was chosen to receive the award by a prize jury comprised of independent curator Wanda Nanibush, who was the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Yvette Mutumba, a cofounder and the artistic managing director of art magazine Contemporary And (C&); Cosmin Costinas, a senior curator at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Munch director Tone Hansen; and Munch senior curator Tominga O’Donnell.
“The Munch Award Jury would like to honor Halaby for her visionary and enduring artistic practice,” said the jury in a joint statement. “She was at the forefront of the development of digital art through her experiments with early computer coding and has been exploring abstraction in its different forms for over sixty years. Her paintings both expand geometric traditions from the Islamic context and introduce contributions from around the world to North Atlantic regional modernism. Halaby believes that innovative approaches to painting can reshape how we see and think,” continued the jury, “not just in terms of aesthetics but also by opening up new ways of thinking about education, technology, and broader social issues. As an activist, she has been organizing for causes concerning class, race, and Palestine since the 1970s. Halaby has been a vocal critic of censorship in the arts for decades, which she herself has faced and overcome.”
Halaby’s win will be celebrated at an October 22 ceremony in Paris taking place during Art Basel, and in a separate ceremony taking place October 24 at Munch in Oslo.