The Culture & Animals Foundation is pleased to announce that Katerina Gregos has been awarded the 2025 Nancy Regan Arts Prize. Gregos, artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, is the curator of the trailblazing exhibition “Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives,” on view through February 2026.
Katerina’s curatorial practice explores relationships between art, society, and politics, and investigates issues including democracy, ecology, and the rights of humans and other animals. She has staged numerous large-scale international exhibitions and nine international biennials, including the first Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art and three National Pavilions at the Venice Biennale: Denmark (2011), Belgium (2015), and Croatia (2019).
“We are inspired by the bold curatorial vision of Katerina Gregos,” says CAF Executive Director Martin Rowe. “The exhibition raises, through the work of sixty artists installed on seven floors of the museum, uncomfortable truths about, as Katerina says, ‘the urgent need to recognize and defend the lives of non-human animals in an anthropocentric world that exploits, oppresses, and brutalizes them.’”
In presenting this award to Katerina, CAF’s arts committee noted that the focus, scale, and scope of the exhibition is unprecedented in the art world, and that the artists consider not only wildlife and charismatic megafauna, but farmed and domesticated animals as well. The exhibition clearly states that animals possess rights and notes that Gregos draws upon cultural critic John Berger’s influential 1972 essay “Why Look at Animals?” to attempt to, in her words, “engender a discussion around the ethics and politics of how we treat animals. By exposing the exploitative, violent mechanisms behind systemic animal abuse, it renders what is shamefully invisible visible.”
CAF also supports her sentiments that,
If we seriously want to engage with climate justice and environmental protection, animals form an integral part of the dialogue. It is an ethical imperative to re-examine our relationship with those non-human beings with whom we co-habit the earth, to imagine new forms of inter-species coexistence, and to acknowledge animal being as different but not lesser than our own.
On receiving the award, Katerina wrote:
I am deeply honored to receive the Culture & Animals Foundation Nancy Regan Arts prize. This award carries special meaning as it comes from the Foundation established by philosopher Tom Regan, whose pioneering work has been vital in raising awareness of animals’ lives and rights. I am profoundly grateful that the Foundation has, through this recognition, highlighted the important role that artists and cultural workers play in advancing the cause of animal rights—bringing animals out of invisibility, acknowledging their sentience, and affirming their right to well-being and freedom from cruelty. May the work of the Foundation, and of all those committed to these ideals, continue to inspire us to imagine and create more just and compassionate ways of living alongside non-human animals.
In presenting the Nancy Regan Arts Prize to a curator for the first time, CAF recognizes the impact of a fearless and innovative curatorial vision. We hope other institutions expand beyond seeing non-human beings as solely objects of inspiration, but as individuals with rights.
