2026 marks the first Desenio Art Awards, a new global initiative for discovering and supporting creativity. Artists are invited to submit their work to six categories for the opportunity to join the Desenio creative universe.

Award Timeline

  • 1

    Submit your artwork

    17 Mar – 19 Apr, 2026

  • 2

    Vote for nominees

    28 Apr – 24 May, 2026

    Currently active

  • 3

    Discover winners

    15 Oct, 2026

Nominees in Painter of the Year

  • Izabella Mueller

    Izabella Mueller

    Poland

    Izabella Mueller makes figurative painting and symbolic, layered compositions. Her works center on the female figure, where playful elements and animal motifs introduce tension and narrative depth. The jury recognizes her distinctive visual language, balancing delicacy with unease, and creating images that invite interpretation beyond the surface.

    Vote
  • Lindsey Cherek Waller

    Lindsey Cherek Waller

    United States of America

    Lindsey Cherek Waller creates vibrant paintings centered on joy, pleasure, and community. Through expressive color and playful compositions, she reimagines everyday scenes as spaces of possibility and belonging. The jury recognizes her bold, generous visual language, inviting viewers to feel seen while envisioning a more open, inclusive, and hopeful world.

    Vote
  • Julia Humbla

    Julia Humbla

    Sweden

    Julia Humbla paints figurative, emotionally driven works centered on intimacy and human connection. With a soft, muted palette and delicate sense of movement, she captures moving moments that resonate deeply. The jury highlights her ability to transform everyday relationships into timeless, poetic scenes where vulnerability and strength coexist.

    Vote
  • Helena Aschbacher Malm

    Helena Aschbacher Malm

    Sweden

    Helena Aschbacher Malm creates abstract oil paintings rooted in memory and emotion. Her intuitive process balances warmth and melancholy, where soft color fields meet darker undertones. The jury recognizes her ability to translate personal experience into atmospheric works that feel both intimate and expansive, inviting reflection.

    Vote
  • Simon Miedinger

    Simon Miedinger

    Sweden

    Simon Miedinger creates abstract portraits built from energetic, flowing lines. His painted faces represent many identities at once, capturing unseen stories and strength. The jury recognizes his distinctive visual language, where form dissolves and re-emerges - expressing the complexity of identity with sensitivity, movement, and emotional depth.

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  • Negar Zonoobi

    Negar Zonoobi

    United States of America

    Negar Zonoobi creates intricate, dreamlike works where nature and the human body intertwine. Through layered forms, biomorphic shapes, and subtle symbolism, she explores identity, memory, and transformation. The jury highlights her poetic visual language, balancing abstraction and precision to evoke emotional depth and a sense of introspective discovery.

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Nominees in Mixed Media & Urban Artist of the Year

  • Paloma Villarreal

    Paloma Villarreal

    United States of America

    Paloma Villarreal creates vibrant paintings that transform everyday scenes into intimate reflections on memory and identity. Working intuitively with color and form, she balances softness and structure. The jury recognizes her ability to turn the familiar into emotionally resonant works, where nostalgia, care, and personal histories unfold.

    Vote
  • Samuel Centrella

    Samuel Centrella

    United States of America

    Samuel Centrella creates raw, expressive artworks driven by gesture and intuition. Through layered marks and mixed media, he channels emotion and explores the human condition. The jury recognizes his uncompromising approach, where spontaneity and vulnerability merge into powerful compositions that feel immediate, honest, and personal.

    Vote
  • Abraham K. Tumwine

    Abraham K. Tumwine

    Uganda

    Abraham K. Tumwine creates bold mixed-media works blending painting, 3D, and digital collage. Rooted in Afrocentric narratives, his imagery explores identity, culture, and transformation through layered symbols and visual codes. The jury recognizes his dynamic, contemporary language, bridging tradition and digital expression to amplify diverse Black voices and perspectives.

    Vote
  • Marques DeLoney

    Marques DeLoney

    United States of America

    Marques DeLoney creates vibrant mixed-media works that merge collage, painting, and digital culture. His compositions reflect contemporary life, identity, and the emotional impact of online environments. The jury recognizes his bold visual language, layered, dynamic, and confrontational, capturing the tension between individuality and the noise of the digital age.

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  • Micosch Holland

    Micosch Holland

    Netherlands

    Micosch Holland creates mixed-media collages that reassemble fragmented imagery into bold, layered compositions. Drawing from Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, his work reflects the fragility of the contemporary world. The jury recognizes his ability to merge analog and digital elements into striking visual statements that are both complex and thought-provoking.

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  • Ina Streit

    Ina Streit

    Germany

    Ina Streit creates intuitive, meditative paintings exploring presence and transience. Working with fluid color and layered forms, she embraces process and imperfection. The jury recognizes her subtle, contemplative approach, inviting viewers to slow down, engage with the moment, and value a sense of balance and awareness.

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Nominees in Illustrator of the Year

  • Alina Yarosh

    Alina Yarosh

    Sweden

    Illustrator Alina Yarosh creates vibrant, intuitive works shaped by a naïve aesthetic and bold color harmony. Focusing on people and nature, her imagery weaves memory, identity, and cultural roots into expressive compositions. The jury recognizes her ability to balance simplicity and depth - crafting personal, playful scenes that resonate with warmth and connection.

    Vote
  • Joeyline Tannous

    Joeyline Tannous

    Germany

    Joeyline Tannous creates intimate, joyful scenes inspired by everyday rituals. Working with expressive color and loose, painterly forms, she captures scenes with food that invite pause and connection. The jury recognizes her ability to transform the ordinary into warm, personal narratives - where spontaneity and imperfection bring a sense of lightness and lived experience.

    Vote
  • Alexandra Ramirez

    Alexandra Ramirez

    United Kingdom

    Illustrator Alexandra Ramirez creates bold, high-energy works inspired by sport, movement, and urban culture. Through vivid color and simplified forms, she captures rhythm and motion with striking clarity. The jury recognizes her dynamic visual language—where playfulness meets power, transforming everyday moments into vibrant, contemporary storytelling.

    Vote
  • Luísa Petiz

    Luísa Petiz

    Portugal

    Luísa Petiz delicately captures the soul of urban spaces through her refined watercolor practice. Her architectural portraits go beyond documentation, becoming intimate visual memories that preserve the identity and atmosphere of places. The jury highlights her sensitivity to detail, light, and composition, as well as her ability to translate cultural heritage into poetic, timeless narratives.

    Vote
  • Alice Hjelm

    Alice Hjelm

    Sweden

    Alice Hjelm creates playful, vibrant illustrations defined by bold color and clean lines. Drawing from everyday life and human interaction, her work captures moments with warmth and clarity. The jury highlights her ability to combine simplicity with emotional insight - crafting images that feel both lighthearted and perceptive at the same time.

    Vote
  • Petra Holíková

    Petra Holíková

    Czech Republic

    Petra Holíková’s work offers viewers a moment to pause, inviting them to reconnect with nature and the everyday. The jury is drawn to her balanced compositions, where figures, animals, and plants coexist in harmony. Through soft color and clear storytelling, her illustrations evoke warmth and intimacy, translating personal connection to nature into calm, universally resonant imagery.

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Nominees in Graphic Artist of the Year

  • Cecilie Schollert Hansen

    Cecilie Schollert Hansen

    Denmark

    Artist Cecilie Schollert Hansen works across painting and digital media, guided by an intuitive and emotionally driven process. In her layered compositions, traditional techniques meet digital transformation. The jury highlights her vibrant use of color and texture, where personal experience becomes tactile and immediate, creating works that feel both sensitive and contemporary.

    Vote
  • Joel Mellström

    Joel Mellström

    Sweden

    Graphic designer Joel Mellström creates surreal, minimalist collages that blur the line between reality and imagination. Guided by intuition, his dreamlike compositions unfold with quiet precision. The jury highlights his ability to create open, immersive spaces, where familiar elements shift and dissolve, inviting reflections on identity, perception, and the fragile tension of the present moment.

    Vote
  • Mareike Böhmer

    Mareike Böhmer

    Germany

    Mareike Böhmer creates abstract, minimalist works defined by calm precision and a reduced palette. Balancing expressive brushwork with digital refinement, her compositions unfold in layers of texture and tone. The jury highlights her restrained yet sensitive approach, where subtle shifts in color and form evoke a contemplative stillness that lingers beyond the image.

    Vote
  • Guya Maggi

    Guya Maggi

    Italy

    Artist Guya Maggi works across painting and pattern, drawing from the visual language of Mediterranean culture. In her work, bold color and stylized botanical forms evoke the warmth and rhythm of southern landscapes. The jury highlights her ability to translate memory into pattern, where decorative surfaces become atmospheric and immersive, creating compositions that feel both vibrant and deeply rooted.

    Vote
  • Novalie Horn

    Novalie Horn

    Sweden

    Novalie works across illustration and graphic design, merging detailed drawing with bold typography. In her work, familiar symbols are restructured into sharp visual statements. The jury highlights her confident use of contrast, where monochrome illustration meets striking color, creating compositions that feel immediate, graphic, and charged with contemporary energy.

    Vote
  • Emma Kjellin

    Emma Kjellin

    Sweden

    Emma Kjellin creates graphic design and illustrations, in her own unique visual language. In her practice, organic forms and muted palettes create a sense of balance and stillness. The jury highlights her ability to simplify without losing depth, where minimal shapes carry emotional weight, resulting in compositions that feel both gentle and powerful at the same time.

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Nominees in Emerging Talent of the Year

  • Daniel Tagbo

    Daniel Tagbo

    United States of America

    Daniel Tagbo creates expressive, symbol-laden works that blur the boundaries between memory, imagination, and reality. Rooted in spontaneity and human expressionism, his compositions unfold as layered, intuitive deconstructions of lived experience. The jury highlights his raw, investigative approach, where fragmented figures and shifting narratives invite viewers into a deeply personal yet universal search for meaning.

    Vote
  • Marine Aimée

    Marine Aimée

    Canada

    Painter Marine Aimée creates intimate, figurative works that navigate grief, healing, and emotional transformation. Blending realism with soft abstraction, her paintings unfold as quiet, psychological spaces shaped by memory and lived experience. The jury highlights her sensitive, introspective approach - where vulnerability becomes strength, and each image traces a path from fragmentation toward self-understanding and renewal.

    Vote
  • Whitney Igbinewuare

    Whitney Igbinewuare

    United Kingdom

    Whitney Igbinewuare is a artist whose figurative paintings capture the quiet intensity of everyday life. Drawing inspiration from personal encounters and urban rhythms, her work transforms fleeting, mundane moments into memorable images. The jury highlights her ability to find stillness within movement - where intimacy, memory, and observation converge. Her compositions reflect both the act of being and becoming.

    Vote
  • Graziella Musumeci

    Graziella Musumeci

    Austria

    Graziella Musumeci creates delicate, evolving works that move between figuration and abstraction, rooted in close observation of nature. Her practice unfolds as a process of transformation - where organic forms shift between body, plant, and inner states. The jury highlights her sensitive, research-driven approach, where traces of making remain visible, and each work is a careful balance of fragility, change, and emergence.

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  • Amanda Engqvist

    Amanda Engqvist

    Sweden

    Amanda Engqvist creates vibrant, intuitive paintings where color, pattern, and flowers take center stage. Self-taught, she embraces spontaneity and imperfection, allowing each piece to unfold freely. The jury highlights her joyful visual language, where checkerboard rhythms and blooming flowers become an expressive way to communicate emotion and presence.

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  • Caroline Eklöf

    Caroline Eklöf

    Sweden

    Caroline Eklöf paints soft, atmospheric works shaped by emotion, memory, and intuition. Working in layered washes of acrylic and watercolor, she captures the tension between stillness and movement. The jury highlights her subtle visual language - where light, texture, and delicate shifts in tone reveal deeper narratives the closer you look.

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Nominees in Photographer of the Year

  • Hanna Göransson

    Hanna Göransson

    Sweden

    Hanna Göransson works primarily with photography, shaped by a lifelong instinct to create. In her work, she stages bold collisions between beauty and discomfort. The jury highlights her sharp, playful gaze, where glossy surfaces meet friction, turning everyday objects into striking, unsettling compositions that linger.

    Vote
  • Maja Johansson

    Maja Johansson

    Sweden

    Photographer Maja Johansson, based in Småland’s where forest meets sea, captures fleeting encounters between place, color, and form. Her work transforms moments into vivid visual narratives. The jury honors her ability to balance contrast and calm, creating immersive scenes where everyday landscapes become striking, almost surreal experiences.

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  • Vanessa Wall

    Vanessa Wall

    Sweden

    Photographer Vanessa Wall creates whimsical, dreamlike images shaped by movement, color, and contrast. In her work, she elevates the ordinary through playful composition and a keen eye for detail. The jury highlights her ability to turn the mundane into visual poetry, where humor, tension, and beauty coexist in striking, memorable scenes.

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  • Anton Björkman

    Anton Björkman

    Sweden

    Photographer and filmmaker Anton Björkman works at the intersection of movement, form, and emotion. His images explore the body through light, distortion, and abstraction. The jury recognizes his ability to balance precision with unpredictability, creating raw, tactile works where motion and imperfection transform form into something deeply expressive.

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  • Emilia Ahlgren

    Emilia Ahlgren

    Sweden

    Emilia Ahlgren is a photographer with a minimalist, intuitive gaze that is shaped by presence and stillness. Her images distill light, surface, and form into poetic moments. The jury recognizes her ability to transform the ordinary into contemplative spaces, where absence, subtlety, and emotion invite the viewer to pause and reflect.

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  • Jorge Conde

    Jorge Conde

    Spain

    Jorge Conde works across photography and mixed media, creating layered, conceptual images that challenge visual culture. His practice examines hyper-consumption, power, and ecological crisis. The jury recognizes his striking ability to merge poetic imagery with critical reflection, crafting works that confront, question, and expand how we see contemporary landscapes.

    Vote

Voting now open

Cast your vote for the 2026 nominees before May 24.
Voting is handled through our external partner platform.

Vote now

Award Categories

Emerging Talent of the Year

For emerging artists across all creative disciplines. This category celebrates new voices with a distinctive style, fresh perspective, and strong creative potential.

Illustrator of the Year

For illustrators working with hand-drawn or digital techniques, from character-based work and storytelling to editorial and conceptual illustration.

Photographer of the Year

For photographers creating original images with strong composition and visual storytelling, including portrait, landscape, architecture, documentary, and conceptual photography.

Graphic Artist of the Year

For graphic artists exploring bold composition, typography and visual communication, from poster-style graphics to modern, minimal or experimental expressions.

Mixed Media & Urban Artist of the Year

For artists combining multiple materials, techniques or influences to create layered, experimental or non-traditional work. This includes mixed media practices as well as art inspired by street and urban culture, such as graffiti, mural-based work, stencil art and contemporary urban aesthetics.

Painter of the year

For artists working primarily with paint, including acrylic, oil, watercolor or similar mediums. This category celebrates excellence across all painting styles, from abstract and figurative to impressionistic and contemporary, with a focus on technique, originality and visual impact.

2026 Jury

Our jury brings together creative leaders from across Desenio, with expertise in art direction, photography, PR, and brand vision. With a shared passion for creativity and a trained eye for originality, craftsmanship, and visual impact, they will select the artworks that truly stand out.

2026 Desenio Art Awards jury
Eric Flink

Eric Flink

CEO, Desenio

As CEO of Desenio, Eric brings a sharp commercial mind and a genuine appreciation for creativity and visual culture. When he’s not steering the company’s global growth, you’ll likely find him behind a camera. An avid photographer with a keen eye for composition, light and storytelling, Eric is especially passionate about space and photography; both on their own and where they meet.

Annica Wallin

Annica Wallin

Chief Creative Officer, Desenio

Annica leads the creative vision behind Desenio’s art offering, shaping collections, concepts and storytelling with a strong instinct for aesthetics, relevance and what people want to live with on their walls. She has played a central role in defining the brand’s artistic direction and has a sharp eye for visual trends, creative expression and emerging talent. With her experience in curation and brand-building through art, Annica brings a thoughtful perspective and a discerning eye to the jury.

Sofie Andersson

Sofie Andersson

Head of Art Atelier, Desenio

Sofie brings art experience and an uncanny knack for spotting trends before they hit the mainstream. She’s worked closely with every artist in the Desenio Collective, helping shape their vision and bring it to life. As Head of Desenio’s Art Atelier, she oversees artistic development and the creation of original works, always judging with an eye for craftsmanship, originality, and art that makes a real impact on the wall.

Anna Sylvan

Anna Sylvan

Head of PR & Concepts, Desenio

With years of PR experience and a flair for crafting show-stopping concepts, Anna knows how to get art both seen and talked about. As Head of PR & Concept at Desenio, she turns launches, collaborations, and stories into momentum, connecting art with the audiences that matter, while creating buzz that resonates globally.

David Jerner

David Jerner

Photographer, Desenio

David isn’t just a photographer, he’s a full-blooded creative force. Beyond his talent behind the lens, he’s a stylist, an artist, and a visionary who sees far beyond limits. At Desenio, he brings stories to life through mood, detail, and composition, with a trained eye for imagery that’s strong, current, and timeless.

About the Desenio Art Awards

The Vision Behind The Award

We believe great art should be seen, supported and shared.

The Desenio Art Awards was created to spotlight original talent and open doors for artists worldwide. By connecting creativity with a global audience, we make sure inspiring art reaches homes, public spaces and audiences everywhere.

How The Art Awards Works

  • Free and open to artists, photographers and creatives worldwide.
  • Submissions for 2026 are now closed.
  • The Desenio Jury is in the process of selecting six nominees in each category.
  • Nominees are announced by the jury on 28 Apr 2026.
  • Final winners will be selected by a combination of the Jury's vote and a public vote, which opens here on 28 Apr 2026.
  • Final winners are chosen through a combination of jury decision and public vote.
  • The award culminates in a celebratory gala evening in Stockholm.

What The Winning Artists Receive

  • 1

    International exposure across Desenio’s channels and becoming a Featured Artist.

  • 2

    A trip to Stockholm for the Gala Event in October 2026.

  • 3

    A monetary award in recognition of outstanding artistic talent.