Four California Institute of the Arts alums and one Cal Arts faculty member have been recognized by Creative Capital, the nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression, with the recent announcement of the 2026 Creative Capital Awards and the inaugural State of the Art Prize.

Indigenous dance and somatic movement artist brooke smiley (Dance BFA 2005), of Ojai, was selected as the California artist to receive the inaugural State of the Art Prize. The State of the Art prize was awarded to 53 individual artists, one from every state, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

Awarded for the first time in Creative Capital’s 25-year history, the prize provides each recipient with a $10,000 unrestricted grant, extending the organization’s “democratic, national, open call to serve more artists at the grassroots level and to foster creativity and innovation in a broad range of rural, regional and urban communities.”

The Creative Capital Award, known for supporting original and ambitious project proposals, will fund the creation of 49 new works across visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, literature and multidisciplinary and socially engaged practices.

Among this year’s Creative Capital Award recipients are four members of the CalArts community: visual artist Sadie Barnette (Art BFA 2006); performing artist and composer Sharon Chohi Kim (Music MFA 2014); writer and performer Roger Q. Mason, a member of the CalArts School of Theater faculty and vocalist and interdisciplinary artist Carmina Escobar (Music MFA 2010), who is both an alumna and faculty member in The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.

The Creative Capital Award provides each recipient with up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, along with professional development services and community-building opportunities.

The 2026 Creative Capital Award and State of the Art Prize recipients were selected from a pool of 4,546 applications submitted through a national open call and evaluated by 107 industry leaders, programmers, cultural producers and artists before advancing to discipline-specific final panels.

For a full list of awardees and more information, visit https://creative-capital.org/press/announcing-2026-creative-capital-awards-state-of-the-art-prize-artists/.

Creative Captial was founded in 1999, after the U.S. Congress pressured the National Endowment for the Arts to discontinue grants to individual artists, Creative Capital defends freedom of expression by funding individual artists seeking to create new work.

For more information about Creative Capital visit https://creative-capital.org/.