CHICAGO, IL.- MoCP announced the 2026 Snider Prize Award recipient Khidr Joseph and honorable mentions Ashley Michelle Hannah and Nika McKagen.

Khidr Joseph

Khidr Joseph works in photography and sculpture to address personal and collective ways of remembering and honoring those who came before us. His Monuments We Carried Home series explores the stories of family members he never had the opportunity to know, including those who served in the military combat. Joseph creates staged self-portraits in which he wears a ghillie suit he crafted himself, with only small details of his body visible through the suit. He also creates still-life photographs featuring objects that represent items collected by his family members, which Joseph arranges and photographs in front of enlarged backdrops depicting historical still-life paintings to draw connections to memento mori and traditions of altar-making throughout art history.

Joseph recently completed his MFA in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ashley Michelle Hannah

Ashley Michelle Hannah received a BA in Art Practice from Stanford University (2020) and an MFA in Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles (2026). Her work, often inspired by personal experiences with violence, disability, and loss, has been exhibited at Stanford University, the Bard Hessel Museum, KITA Gallery, the Virginia Museum of the Civil War, and FotoFocus Cincinnati, among others.





Nika McKagen

Nika McKagen recieved an MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2026). McKagen works with traditional wet darkroom photography, sculpture, and textile. Her work explores the sublime experiences that tend to occur at the edges of worlds, cultures, and languages, focusing on the intersections between digital and analogue methods of creating images.

The Snider Prize Award

The Snider Prize is a purchase award given to emerging artists in their final year of graduate study. The winner receives $3,000, and two honorable mentions each receive $500 towards the purchase of work to be added to MoCP’s permanent collection.

Established by the generosity of Lawrence K. and Maxine Snider, the Snider Prize forms a part of the museum’s ongoing commitment to support new talent in the field of contemporary photography.