The Capricious Award will provide one photographer with the resources and editorial support to bring a body of work to fruition. The award is juried by photographers, critics and curators, with the intent to select a photographer whose work is both distinct in point of view and boldly relevant to the unfolding issues of our time.

The Capricious Award provides one photographer with the resources and editorial support to bring a body of work to fruition. Each year the award is juried by photographers, critics and curators, with the intent to select a photographer whose work is both distinct in point of view and boldly relevant to the unfolding issues of our time.

The recipient will be awarded with resources, valued at $25,000, geared towards the production of a limited edition book. This includes access to our in-house design and editing team and international distribution.

Capricious is an arts foundation based in New York focused primarily on art book publishing and an annual photo book award. Founded first as a fine art photography magazine in 2004 by Sophie Mörner, Capricious has provided an unparalleled international platform for emerging and underrepresented photographers over the span of nearly 20 years. Past recipients of the Capricious Photo Award include: John Edmonds, Sasha Phyars-Burgess, and Farah Al Qasimi.

Vivian Crockett

Vivian Crockett is a Brazilian-American scholar, and curator focusing largely on modern and contemporary art of African diasporas, (Afro)Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. She is currently The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Harris is represented in the permanent collections of renowned institutions and has been widely exhibited internationally, including most recently in “Photography’s Last Century” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; in “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story’’ and “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among many others. Harris lives and works in New York, serving as a Professor of Art at New York University.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is a curator and scholar of photography and the arts of Africa. In 2017 she co-curated Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography, and edited its accompanying publication (Steidl), which was shortlisted for an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research (2018). A 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee, Onabanjo’s writing has been published by Aperture, Autograph ABP, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Yorker, The Photobook Review, RISD Museum's Manual, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate Etc, and Steidl, amongst others. She is a member of the curatorial team for the 2022 Triennial of Photography Hamburg.

Troy Montes-Michie

Troy Montes-Michie is an interdisciplinary painter and collage artist. His work engages black consciousness, Latinx experience, immigration and queerness through assemblage and juxtaposition. Utilizing textile, garment and archival paper, from newsprint to pornography, Montes-Michie subverts dominant narratives by placing past and present in confrontation. The resulting work is a non-linear extolification of political resistance and transgressive self-expression and gesture.

Sophie Mörner

Sophier Mörner is the founder and owner of Company Gallery and Capricious Publishing, now within Capricious Foundation. Founded as a fine art photography magazine in 2004, Capricious has since published numerous books and magazines supporting emerging, intersectional voices.

Anika Sabin

Anika Sabin is the Executive Director of Capricious Foundation, joining Capricious Publishing in 2010. They most recently edited Jonathan Lyndon Chase's wild wild Wild West/ Haunting of the Seahorse, and co-edits the Capricious Photo Award monographs including Farah Al Qasimi forthcoming monograph Hello Future.

Lumi Tan

Lumi Tan is Senior Curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she has organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists across disciplines and generations since 2010. Most recently, Tan has worked with Kevin Beasley, Lex Brown, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Baseera Khan, Autumn Knight, and Kenneth Tam.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess

Sasha Phyars-Burgess was born in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She received a BA in photography from Bard College and an MFA from Cornell University. Phyars-Burgess was the second recipient of the Capricious Photo Award and published her first monograph Untitled in 2021.

A.L. Steiner

Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous writers, performers, designers, activists and artists. She is Senior Critic in Film/Video and Assistant Dean for Planning and Relations at Yale University's School of Art. As an artist, A.L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne.