The inaugural Nowness Awards celebrates ten filmmakers for their cultural breakthroughs

The global digital video channel Nowness has announced the ten honourees for its inaugural Nowness Awards, handed out for breakthrough cultural excellence in film and video. The list is peppered with artists and filmmakers working across a wide variety of genres – from large commercial campaigns to films exploring the lives of LGBTQ+-identifying people in the Black British community and investigating the Puerto Rican community’s reaction to climate change. The ten honourees are It’s Nice That favourite Rhea Dillon, Campbell Addy, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ivan Blackstock, Holly Blakey, A.V. Rockwell, Jacolby Satterwhite, Sandra Winther, Baloji and Xinyuan Xheng Lu.

The honourees, who will be celebrated at the Modern Media Gallery at London’s V&A this evening, were chosen to capture the breadth of moving-image work out there and, according to Nowness, represent the defining voices of today and the near future. Bunny Kinney, the creative director for Nowness, says in the announcement that the honourees’ work “not only embodies the best of 2019, but has the potential to truly push culture forward in 2020 and beyond”.

The award was judged by some of the leading lights of the creative industry, from Dazed co-founder Jefferson Hack to multidisciplinary artist Es Devlin, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, model and designer Alexa Chung, Oscar-nominated Luca Guadagnino, filmmaker Isaac Lock (who recently directed a hilarious Fiorucci documentary), director Andrew Thomas Huang, photographer and filmmaker Nadia Lee Cohen and Canada’s Albert Moya.

The awards will also be accompanied by a “ones to watch” list for 2020, chosen by Nowness’s team and community.