Rosalind Krauss, university professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, has been named one of four recipients of the 2025 Balzan Prize from the International Balzan Foundation. The award is presented annually in four subjects that change every year. For the 2025 cohort, prizes were awarded in the categories of democracy, art, time, and gene therapy. Each prize is valued at approximately $940,000, half of which must be allocated by the award-winner to support projects carried out by young researchers.
Dr. Krauss – the only woman among this year’s Balzan Prize recipients – was honored “for her outstanding scholarly achievements and her foundational role in the establishment of contemporary art as a field of research.”
Throughout her career, Dr. Krauss has sought to understand the phenomenon of modernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimensions. Her research has examined a wide-range of artistic disciplines, such as photography, painting, and sculpture. She has authored several books, including The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, 1986) and The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press, 1994).
Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1992, Dr. Krauss taught at the CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College, Princeton University, MIT, and Wellesley College, a women’s liberal arts institution in Massachusetts. She is also the co-founder of October, a journal focused on contemporary art criticism.
Dr. Krauss holds a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.