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.
The line‑up of judges has included, and will continue to include, people who embody what the Prize sets out to do: bridging the worlds of entrepreneurship, education, the art market and the inner life of creative practice. Bringing together a FTSE‑100 founder, art prize creators, an artist‑educator and a seer and healer, this evolving panel reflects the mix of commercial insight, cultural rigour and deep sensitivity that the Prize aims to offer emerging artists as they build sustainable careers.
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Past judges have included Peter Hargreaves CBE, one of the UK’s most successful self‑made entrepreneurs, co‑founder of leading investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, an innovator in online investing and a serious art collector. New Blood Art is grateful for the insight and attention he has given.
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Professor Anita Taylor is an artist and Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, and founding Director of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and of Drawing Projects UK, a centre dedicated to championing drawing as a vital contemporary practice.
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Serenella Ciclitira is a curator and collector who, with her husband David, founded the Global Eye Programme and Ciclitira Prize, international initiatives that have supported hundreds of emerging artists and recent graduates from leading art schools.
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Jim Rajan is a seer and healer, and founder of The Subtle Qualities School for highly sensitive people, where he works with sensitivity, intuition and energetic awareness as strengths rather than liabilities; his presence on the panel brings a rare attentiveness to the inner life of artists and to the more subtle dimensions of creative practice that commercial frameworks can easily miss.
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Sarah Ryan is a fine art graduate, former art educator, and founder and director of New Blood Art, one of the UK’s first online galleries dedicated to emerging artists. Drawing on her background in art education, financial journalism and psychotherapy, she has designed a structure that actively connects UK art schools with collectors. She is driven by a belief that artists with talent, passion and vision should have a genuine chance to enter the market and build commercially viable careers, not just those with existing advantages or connections.
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In 2025, Mary‑Alice Stack, Chief Executive of Creative United, joins the panel, bringing deep experience in designing finance and business support programmes that help artists and cultural organisations build sustainable enterprises.
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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.