Empire creator Lee Daniels, Capernaum director Nadine Labaki, and avant-garde artist Marina Abramovic will be honored at this year’s Venice Film Festival with the 2026 Liberatum Pioneer Awards.
The awards, presented by Pablo Ganguli’s Liberatum cultural diplomacy organization, recognize artists whose work “has challenged convention, broken down systemic barriers, expanded artistic boundaries, redefined the possibilities of their respective fields and promoted the importance of preserving human dignity.”
The awards presentations will take place in Venice on Sept 6 and 7 as part of the inaugural Liberatum Art & Cinema, a new multidisciplinary programme staged to mark the cultural group’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
Announcing this year’s winners on Wednesday, Liberatum said it was recognizing Daniels, director for the “bold, uncompromising filmmaking that has consistently brought subjects largely absent from mainstream American film and television into major public view, including Precious, The Butler and Empire.” Daniels’ focus on the depiction of “Black life, trauma, sexuality and family with candour, at scale and without dilution,” the group said, “has opened space within the industry for narratives previously considered commercially untenable. His selection reflects Liberatum’s recognition of
filmmakers who have used popular form to carry unpopular truths.”
Labaki is being recognised for her feature films, including Where Do We Go Now? (2011) and Capernaum (2018). Both premiered in Cannes, with the latter and winning the Jury Prize, en route to an Oscar nomination for best international feature. The Lebanese director, Liberatum said, “has carried stories from Lebanon and the wider Middle East to international audiences on their own terms” by combining “documentary rigour with narrative craft to address displacement, poverty and conflict without sentimentality.”
The Pioneer honor for Serbian performance artist Abramović, famous for her landmark “The Artist Is Present” (2010) piece in which she sat silently at a table for more than 700 hours over nearly three months, inviting visitors to sit opposite her and maintain eye contact is in recognition for establishing “performance art as a discipline in its own right and expanded its vocabulary further than any of her contemporaries,” the group said. “Abramović’s practice has repeatedly used duration, presence and physical risk to examine the relationship between artist and audience, and her influence now extends well beyond performance art into the wider language of contemporary visual culture.”
Abramović this year also has a major solo exhibition at Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia, the first living woman artist to receive the honor in the institution’s 250-plus year history.
Previous winners of the Liberatum Pioneer Award include actor Angela Bassett, Brazilian anthropologist Ivete Sacramento, and actor Ellen Burstyn, who was honored at the Venice film festival in 2024.
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