COURTESY THOMA FOUNDATION
The Thoma Foundation announced today it has given this year’s Arts Writing Awards in Digital Art to Christiane Paul and Nora Khan. The awards, which were first given out last year, recognize writers who have made significant contributions to criticism about digital art; this is the second set of winners.
Paul will receive $40,000, $10,000 of which is a project grant. This week, she released A Companion to Digital Art, a 632-page book that offers an up-to-the minute account of digital art’s history. In addition to working on a number of important survey books about digital art, Paul is also an adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum and an associate professor and associate dean at the New School’s media studies department.
Khan is being recognized as an emerging digital-art writer, so her award includes $20,000, $5,000 of which is a project grant. Khan is a contributing editor at Rhizome, and her writing has appeared on that site, Dis magazine, and Kill Screen, among other online and print publications.
Paul and Khan were selected by a committee that included Steve Dietz, the president and artistic director of Northern Lights.mn; Orit Gat, the features editor at Rhizome; and Omar Kholeif, the Manilow Senior Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
In a statement, Kholeif said of the winners, “Their diverse practices as authors on digital art and culture complement each other beautifully; together they suggest a speculative future history for our joint field of practice—one that is inclusive and historically rigorous and generous to the community of digital art and art history more broadly speaking.”