New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize
The New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize recognises outstanding Fine Art graduates from UK BA and MA programmes, through tutor nominations and New Blood Art’s own outreach.
Founded in 2023, the Prize highlights exceptional emerging artists at a critical transition point - offering visibility, early professional opportunity, and a connection to wider curatorial and collector networks. Its inaugural exhibition took place at Saatchi Gallery London, establishing the Prize within a significant contemporary art setting.
Nominations are made directly by Fine Art tutors across the UK, ensuring that selection is grounded in artistic merit, integrity, and the context of academic and creative development.
The Prize offers something culturally remarkable - a distilled overview of the work emerging from across Fine Art programmes in the UK.
It is a rare insight - not just into remarkable individual emerging artists, but into the collective shape of early stage contemporary practice across the UK. A chance to see themes, material choices, approaches, the artistic atmosphere of a particular year, like a live cultural document, seen through the eyes of tutors who have been close to the making.
Past judges have included Professor Anita Taylor, Serenella Ciclitira, Peter Hargreaves, Jim Rajan, and Sarah Ryan. In 2025, Mary-Alice Stack, Chief Executive of Creative United, joins the panel.
The Prize champions emerging talent, offering a bridge between education and long-term practice.
See the Prize in Pictures
Recognition, Rewritten​
The New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize is the only national award shaped by direct tutor nominations, offering a clear, insider view of what is emerging in UK contemporary art right now.
The Prize brings together standout Fine Art graduates from across the UK, identified through tutor nominations and New Blood Art’s own curatorial review. It gives collectors and audiences a single place to see a distilled cross-section of exceptional new voices in contemporary art.
The direction of the art world is often shaped long before talent enters the room - by money, geography, and access - which influence both who becomes visible and which kinds of work reach public view. The Prize offers a view of where contemporary practice can move when the field reflects talent rather than circumstance.
The UK’s creative education system is world-renowned, and many respected prizes offer routes into public life for emerging artists. The New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize adds a different dimension: every Fine Art department across the UK is invited to nominate its standout graduates, with further selections made through New Blood Art’s curatorial lens. This creates a national snapshot of emerging practice - a read of the field as it forms.
For over two decades, New Blood Art has identified and placed artists before the wider field recognised their work. The Prize extends this legacy, establishing a new collaboration with Fine Art programmes across the UK and offering a national overview available nowhere else.
This is the signal from inside the field: expert judgement gathered at the point where work is being made. It is a rare chance to acquire work from the UK’s most compelling new artists at the very start of their careers.