The Artist Prize is open to every UK artist, every medium, every background. Here’s exactly how winners are selected.
Overview
The process runs in four stages: a qualifying round, a national selection by curators across the UK, a shortlist review by the final panel, and an in-person final at Firstsite.
Qualifying Round
An internal review removes incomplete or ineligible submissions. This ensures every judge’s time is spent on work that meets the basic requirements of the prize.
National Selection
A network of curators from across the UK scores submissions online. Using curators nationwide, rather than a single panel, means the longlist reflects the true breadth of UK artistic practice, not just what’s visible from a handful of institutions.
We expect around 5,000 entries. Every submission receives a score from at least three independent curators. This is our solution to subjectivity: a work that doesn’t resonate with one judge may be exactly what another has spent their career championing.
The 200 highest-scoring entries progress to the Shortlist Selection.
Shortlist Selection
The final panel reviews all 200 longlisted entries online. At this stage, a smaller group of specialists brings depth of expertise to a more focused selection.
The 20 highest-scoring entries will be exhibited at Firstsite.
Winner
The winner of the £30,000 prize is selected in person by the final panel during the group exhibition at Firstsite. This ensures the work has been seen, experienced and assessed in the room – not just on a screen.
Categories
Every work must be submitted to one of the following categories:
- Painting & Drawing
- Photography & Printmaking
- Sculpture & Installation
- Digital, Video & New Media
- Performance
- Mixed Media
- Interdisciplinary & Other
Categories ensure work is seen by the most relevant curators in the National Selection round, giving equal weight to every discipline. Once entries reach the Shortlist Selection, categories become less relevant — at that stage, breadth comes from the diversity of the final panel’s expertise rather than how work is grouped.
If your practice doesn’t fit neatly into a single category, choose the one that best reflects the work you’re submitting. Interdisciplinary & Other is a genuine category, not a fallback.
Criteria
Work is judged against three criteria. These are deliberately medium-agnostic. They apply equally to a painting, a performance, or a digital installation. Each carries the same weight.
Execution
How effectively have you realised your work? Consider craft, technical skill, and whether the work achieves what it sets out to do (recognising that “well-executed” looks different for a performance, a painting, or a participatory project).
Concept
The depth and clarity of the artistic idea. Consider intellectual rigour, emotional resonance, and how fully the concept has been developed.
Impact
The work’s power and significance. Does it create something greater than the sum of its parts? Does it feel urgent, relevant, or culturally important right now?
Scores are combined across all judges for each entry and averaged to produce a final ranking within each category.
On digital submissions
For the vast majority of the process, work is assessed digitally — the only way to ensure submissions can be seen no matter where they come from in the UK. We’ve designed our submission requirements to give judges as fair a representation of your work as possible on screen.
If your work is selected for the exhibition, we’ll be in touch with everything you need to know about presenting it at Firstsite.
On using AI
We ask all entrants to disclose whether AI has been used in the generation of their work. This is not a disqualifying factor – it is a question of transparency.
The Artist Prize celebrates artistic intent, craft and concept. Work that uses AI as a tool, in the same way an artist might use any other medium or technology, is eligible. What we’re interested in is the thinking, decision-making and vision behind the work, not the tools used to realise it.
If AI has played a role in your work, tell us how and why. That context is part of the work.
Feedback
We would love to find a way to get feedback to you. Due to the volume of entries we receive, we won’t be able to provide individual feedback on submissions at any stage of the process.
What we will do is publish an impact report after the prize closes, sharing aggregated data and insights about what we received. We hope this gives the sector and individual artists, something genuinely valuable in return.