Empire creator Lee Daniels, Capernaum director Nadine Labaki, and avant-garde artist Marina Abramovic will be honored at this year’s Venice Film Festival with the 2026 Liberatum Pioneer Awards.

The awards, presented by Pablo Ganguli’s Liberatum cultural diplomacy organization, recognize artists whose work “has challenged convention, broken down systemic barriers, expanded artistic boundaries, redefined the possibilities of their respective fields and promoted the importance of preserving human dignity.”

The awards presentations will take place in Venice on Sept 6 and 7 as part of the inaugural Liberatum Art & Cinema, a new multidisciplinary programme staged to mark the cultural group’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Announcing this year’s winners on Wednesday, Liberatum said it was recognizing Daniels, director for the “bold, uncompromising filmmaking that has consistently brought subjects largely absent from mainstream American film and television into major public view, including Precious, The Butler and Empire.” Daniels’ focus on the depiction of “Black life, trauma, sexuality and family with candour, at scale and without dilution,” the group said, “has opened space within the industry for narratives previously considered commercially untenable. His selection reflects Liberatum’s recognition of
filmmakers who have used popular form to carry unpopular truths.”

Labaki is being recognised for her feature films, including Where Do We Go Now? (2011) and Capernaum (2018). Both premiered in Cannes, with the latter and winning the Jury Prize, en route to an Oscar nomination for best international feature. The Lebanese director, Liberatum said, “has carried stories from Lebanon and the wider Middle East to international audiences on their own terms” by combining “documentary rigour with narrative craft to address displacement, poverty and conflict without sentimentality.”

The Pioneer honor for Serbian performance artist Abramović, famous for her landmark “The Artist Is Present” (2010) piece in which she sat silently at a table for more than 700 hours over nearly three months, inviting visitors to sit opposite her and maintain eye contact is in recognition for establishing “performance art as a discipline in its own right and expanded its vocabulary further than any of her contemporaries,” the group said. “Abramović’s practice has repeatedly used duration, presence and physical risk to examine the relationship between artist and audience, and her influence now extends well beyond performance art into the wider language of contemporary visual culture.”

Abramović this year also has a major solo exhibition at Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia, the first living woman artist to receive the honor in the institution’s 250-plus year history.

Previous winners of the Liberatum Pioneer Award include actor Angela Bassett, Brazilian anthropologist Ivete Sacramento, and actor Ellen Burstyn, who was honored at the Venice film festival in 2024.

EXCLUSIVE: Magna Studios has signed 20,000 Days on Earth filmmakers and artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

The London-based talent rep and production house will handle commercial and brand representation, and we hear will be working with them on longer-form projects further down the line.

Forysth and Pollard were behind 2014 music doc 20,000 Days on Earth, which featured Nick Cave, and more recently made feature doc Broken English, which explored the life of Marianne Faithfull. They have also directed BBC series Murder and anthology shows Likely Stories and The Dali & The Cooper for Sky Arts.

They join the likes of Mona Fastvold, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sebastian Strasser, James Marsh, Asif Kapadia, Hector Dockrill, Ariel Fisher, Oscar Hudson, Brady Corbet, Jeff Tremaine, Sam Pilling and Folkert Verdoor on the books at Magna, which is known for producing Oasis doc Don’t Look Back in Anger.

“Having known and tracked Iain & Jane’s remarkable trajectory over many years, it is clear they occupy a unique space in filmmaking, capturing human emotion with an intensity that is rare to find,” said Davud Karbassioun, co-CEO of Magna.

“Their ability to seamlessly blend diverse mediums directly reflects Magna’s commitment to building a roster that doesn’t only respond to culture, but actively shapes it. They are absolute masters of their craft, and we’re looking forward to building on their story together.”

The news comes soon after Don’t Look Back in Anger found an international home in select IMAX and cinemas worldwide on September 11, ahead of streaming exclusively on Disney+ internationally, and on Hulu and Disney+ in the U.S. later this year.

Karbassioun and former Pulse Studios boss Marissa Clifford launched Magna last year, with Clifford’s former colleague, Thomas Benski, investing through his Lumina label.