Lee Daniels, Nadine Labaki and Marina Abramović to Receive 2026 Liberatum Pioneer Awards in Venice
Filmmaker Lee Daniels, director-actor Nadine Labaki and performance artist Marina Abramović will receive the 2026 Liberatum Pioneer Awards at the Venice Film Festival, the cultural organisation announced on 12 August 2026 (The Hollywood Reporter).
The presentations take place in Venice on 6 and 7 September as part of the inaugural Liberatum Art & Cinema programme, staged to mark the 25th anniversary of the cultural diplomacy organisation founded by Pablo Ganguli.
Daniels was recognised for what Liberatum described as bold, uncompromising filmmaking across projects including Precious, The Butler and the television series Empire. Labaki was honoured for her films Where Do We Go Now? (2011) and Capernaum (2018), both of which premiered at Cannes. Capernaum won the Jury Prize at Cannes and received an Academy Award nomination for best international feature.
Abramović's citation credits her with establishing performance art as a discipline in its own right and expanding its vocabulary beyond her contemporaries. She is widely known for The Artist Is Present (2010), a work at New York's Museum of Modern Art in which she sat silently at a table for more than 700 hours over nearly three months, making eye contact with visitors one at a time. In the same year, she became the first living woman artist to receive a major solo exhibition at Venice's Gallerie dell'Accademia in the institution's 250-plus-year history.
Previous recipients of the Liberatum Pioneer Award include Angela Bassett, Ivete Sacramento and Ellen Burstyn, who was honoured at the Venice Film Festival in 2024.
The choice of Venice ties the awards to one of the world's oldest film festivals, a platform that has long doubled as a stage for adjacent art forms. Bringing a filmmaker, a director from Lebanon and a performance artist under one banner reflects Liberatum's remit of cross-disciplinary cultural recognition, the organisation's stated mission since its founding.
