BRAVA Awards Winners 2026

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (BIMA) is thrilled to announce the 2026 class of BRAVA Awards recipients: Gabriel Zea, RYAN! Feddersen, Inge Bruggeman, and Priscilla Dobler Dzul.

BRAVA—BIMA Recognizes Achievement in the Visual Arts—honors contemporary artists, craftspeople, and makers whose work reflects exceptional artistic vision, technical skill, and meaningful contributions to their field.

This year’s honorees represent four distinct areas: Emerging Artist, Native American & First Nations Artist, Artists’ Books Artist, and Ceramics Artist. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted $15,000 award in recognition of their creative excellence and impact, in addition to:

Recognition in BIMA media
A short video to be produced about the recipient
Invitation to participate in an Award Ceremony at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
Invitation to serve as one of the panelists on the review panel of the next year’s award process

The BRAVA Awards are made possible by the generosity of a visionary BIMA supporter, inspired by the Museum’s mission to champion and uplift working artists.

Learn more about the BRAVA Awards here and read on to meet the 2026 winners!

BIMA’s 2026 BRAVA Awards recipients:

Emerging Artist Award (Puget Sound Region)

Gabriel Zea

Born in Singapore to a Colombian family and raised in a multicultural community in Texas, Gabriel Zea’s desire to create artwork was born from a desire to find a sense of calm despite an outside world frequently in flux. Zea received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He has spent time studying printmaking in Japan, as an artist in residence in Spain, Germany, Russia, and the United States, and as an assistant for notable artists prior to working more independently as an artist in 2018. His recent oil paintings unite disparate elements and conflict into cohesive and atmospheric images that question the constant tumult of the modern world. Zea is currently based in Seattle and continues to exhibit his paintings around the country.

Native American & First Nations Artist Award (Salish Sea region)

RYAN! Feddersen

RYAN! Feddersen specializes in creating compelling site-specific installations and public artworks which invite people to consider our relationships to history, culture, the land, and our non-human-kin. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Cornish College of the Arts and is now based in Tacoma, Washington. Feddersen grew up in Wenatchee and is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, from the Okanogan and Arrow Lakes bands, and of mixed European descent. Her practice focuses on creative problem solving to address social issues through visual allegories. She investigates creative strategies to activate engagement through interactive materials, community sourced content, social practice, fun, and humor. These approaches enable her work to start conversations and promote collective learning. Feddersen has created large-scale site-specific pieces and interactive installations throughout North America and has a growing body of permanent artworks in the public realm.

Artists’ Books Artist Award (United States)

Inge Bruggeman

Inge Bruggeman is based in Berkely, California where she creates art, serves as the Executive Director of the CODEX Foundation, and teaches a course in UC Berkeley’s Special Collections Department. Bruggeman was introduced to the book as an art form as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, where she received a grounding in both the conceptual framework and the mechanics of bookmaking. After graduation, she worked in the Art Department before pursuing an MFA in the Book Arts Program at the University of Alabama. There, she refined her skills and began to engage with the broader book arts world and to support the field through community and volunteerism. She completed a two-year residency at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Bruggeman also is a professor, workshop teacher, researcher, curator, publisher, and lecturer with a global reach. She has a broad and interdisciplinary view of what a book can be and at the heart of her creative work is the relationship between the book—as an object, artifact, and cultural icon—and the people who create it.

2026 Special Choice Category: Ceramics Artist (Puget Sound Region)

Priscilla Dobler Dzul

Priscilla Dobler Dzul is an interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited her work domestically and internationally. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the State University of New York at New Paltz and grew up in the industrial redlined section of South Tacoma, Washington. Familial experiences of sharing culture and history, labor, love, and resilience taught her the importance of community, craft, and folk art. Her inspiration comes from her passion and commitment to the preservation of land, oral stories, craft, and representation of her multi-Maya cultural heritage. Her research is driven by a commitment to narrative change through social justice, racial equity, and artistic mastery. Dzul’s work spans ceramics, sculpture, textiles, and film to build narrative worlds that merge pre‑Columbian mythology, environmental science, and suppressed histories of resistance.

LEARN ABOUT THE BRAVA AWARDS HERE

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