We’re proud to announce this year’s recipients of the AAA Awards.
Congratulations to all the honorees for their work in advancing the field of anthropology. Awards will be presented to honorees at the 2026 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. Honorees will also be featured in the November/December issue of Anthropology News. Learn more about all AAA Prizes and Awards.
Tabitha Payne
A. Thomas Kirsch Award for Southeast Asia Studies
The A. Thomas Kirsch Award for Southeast Asia Studies, established in memory of Cornell anthropologist and Thai studies pioneer A. Thomas Kirsch, supports graduate student members of the AAA engaged in the study of Southeast Asia. Tabitha Payne, a second-year PhD student in Anthropology at Columbia University, receives this year’s award for her research on the experiences of LGBTQ Cambodians during Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge era, 1975–1979). While the Khmer Rouge tribunal brought extensive documentation of gendered and sexualized violence to light, little attention has been paid to whether the regime specifically targeted nonnormative genders and sexualities. Payne’s project addresses this gap through survivor narratives and life history interviews, working closely with activists who are mobilizing these memories toward contemporary political goals. Her research is especially timely as the generation of DK survivors ages, making this a critical moment to document histories that have otherwise gone unrecorded.
Paula Skye Tallman
AAA Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology
This award honors educators who have made outstanding contributions to undergraduate anthropological instruction. Paula Skye Tallman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Carolyn Farrell BVM Endowed Professor of Women and Leadership at Loyola University Chicago, receives this year’s award for her integration of research, mentorship, and undergraduate education. A biological anthropologist studying how ecosocial stressors drive health disparities among women and children in South America and Southeast Asia, Tallman channels this work into her Anthropology Health Action (AHA!) Lab, where students join international fieldwork, data analysis, and grant-writing teams under a model of peer leadership and faculty mentorship grounded in the Jesuit principle of cura personalis. Through this approach, her students have secured nearly $100,000 in grants and fellowships and co-authored 16 scholarly publications, including four with undergraduate first authors. Tallman’s teaching has been honored with Loyola’s Jerónimo Nadal, S.J. Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Langerbeck Outstanding Research Mentor Award, the Peter Hans Kolvenbach Award for Engaged Teaching, and the Alice B. Hayes Award for Advising and Mentoring.
Tina Lasisi
Anthropology in Media Award (AIME)
Established in 1987, the Anthropology in Media Award recognizes those who successfully communicate anthropology to the general public through the media. Tina Lasisi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, receives this year’s award for making the genetics of human variation accessible to broad audiences. Her research examines the evolutionary history and genetic architecture of traits like human hair and pigmentation — traits that have been profoundly racialized yet remain poorly measured — and how anthropology and genetics together describe race, ancestry, and human difference. Lasisi has carried this work well beyond the academy, hosting and co-writing Why Am I Like This?, a PBS Terra series on the evolutionary biology of human traits that has drawn hundreds of thousands of YouTube views, and appearing as a guest expert on NPR’s Short Wave, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, Ologies, and In Those Genes. On TikTok and Instagram, she turns questions people are often reluctant to ask about skin, hair, genetics, and race into clear, rigorous, and often funny explanations — including one explainer on misread skin-color maps that has been viewed nearly half a million times. A cofounder of Black in Biological Anthropology, Lasisi grounds her public-facing work in the conviction that the science of human difference is too consequential to be left unexplained.
Cara Ocobock
Anthropology in Media Award (AIME), Honorable Mention
Each year, the Anthropology in Media Award honors work that brings anthropology to public audiences through the media. Cara Ocobock, Director of the Human Energetics Laboratory and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, receives honorable mention this year for her work bridging human biology, evolutionary science, and public understanding of women’s physiology. Her research integrates anthropology and human biology to examine how anatomy, physiology, and evolution interact with extreme climates and physical activity, including an ongoing project with researchers at the University of Lapland and University of Oulu studying reindeer herders in northern Finland — a highly active cold-climate population — and the health disparities shaped by their life ways. A former powerlifter, Ocobock also brings a feminist lens to the anthropology of sports, highlighting how the underrepresentation of women in exercise physiology research has left both women’s athletic performance and evolutionary reconstructions of the past under-informed and biased; this work has been featured in Scientific American. She further advances science communication through public workshops and by co-hosting the Human Biology Association podcast, The Sausage of Science.
Christopher Lynn
Anthropology in Media Award (AIME), Honorable Mention
The Anthropology in Media Award, given annually since 1987, celebrates the successful translation of anthropological research for a general audience. Christopher Lynn, a biocultural medical anthropologist studying the cultural dimensions of health and human evolutionary biology, receives honorable mention this year for extending that research into accessible public platforms. His PhD research at the University at Albany examined speaking in tongues and stress response among Apostolic Pentecostals in New York, and his current work spans embodied belongingness and health, tattooing and immune response, geophagy in the U.S. Southeast, and fireside relaxation, carried out with collaborators across the U.S., Costa Rica, the Pacific Islands, and the Pacific Northwest. Lynn shares this research with broad audiences as cofounder and cohost of two weekly podcasts, the Sausage of Science for the Human Biology Association and the Tattooing and Human Nature Podcast.
Barbara King
Anthropology in Media Award (AIME), Honorable Mention
Since 1987, the Anthropology in Media Award has recognized outstanding communication of anthropology to public audiences. Barbara King, Emerita Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary and Research Fellow at PAN Works center for animal ethics, receives honorable mention this year for a career of public writing on evolution, animal cognition, and multispecies ethics. She is the author of seven books, including Evolving God, How Animals Grieve, and Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals, and her writing has appeared in NPR, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Aeon, Psyche, Undark, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Anthropology News. A Guggenheim Fellow and TED speaker whose talk on animal love and grief has reached over 3.6 million views, King is also a book critic for NPR, Science Magazine, and the TLS as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Through frequent podcast, radio, and press appearances, she works to convey the richness of an evolutionary, multispecies perspective — a theme she continues in her forthcoming book on the wellbeing of cats.
Youjoung (Yuna) Kim
The David Schneider Prize honors work that treats kinship, culture theory, or American culture in a fresh and innovative fashion, reflecting the provocative and iconoclastic spirit of Schneider’s own scholarship. Youjoung (Yuna) Kim, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Human Rights Initiative in Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology, receives this year’s prize for her book project, Claiming Kin: Gender, Law, and Family Politics in Transnational Reconciliation under South Korea’s Jeju 4.3 Special Act. Her ethnographic research examines how South Korea’s patrilineal reparations framework marginalizes women’s kinship claims in the aftermath of the Jeju 4·3 violence (1947–1954), in which more than 30,000 people were killed under accusations of communist sympathies. Drawing on fieldwork among Jeju Islanders and the Jeju diaspora in Osaka, Kim’s work shows how gender shapes who counts as kin — and who is entitled to redress. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and several programs at Johns Hopkins University.
Michael Min-Torresdey
Dissertation Fellowship for Historically Underrepresented Persons in Anthropology
This annual $10,000 fellowship supports minority doctoral candidates in anthropology as they complete their dissertation research. Michael Min-Torresdey, a PhD candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, receives this year’s fellowship for his dissertation on how Indigenous Kumiay/Kumeyaay communities in the Mexico–U.S. borderlands sustain collective belonging and cultural-linguistic continuity amid bordering and enclosure that have fragmented Indigenous lands, kin relations, and everyday mobility. Drawing on long-term, community-engaged research, Min-Torresdey examines how everyday interactions in spaces of language reclamation, political advocacy, and intercommunity organizing cultivate social solidarity and renewed formations of community, subjectivity, and agency grounded in land and kin. By centering mobility as a relational practice and triangulating oral, archival, and contemporary sources, his work brings linguistic anthropology into sustained conversation with critical border studies and Indigenous resurgence scholarship, situating the border as the latest phase in a colonial continuum of enclosure.
ken anderson
AAA Executive Director’s Award
The AAA Executive Director’s Award recognizes individuals whose work demonstrates the power of anthropology in advancing equity, inclusion, and social change. ken anderson, an anthropologist whose career has spanned industry, academia, and public institutions, receives this year’s award for more than three decades spent expanding where anthropology could be practiced and what it could contribute to technology, organizations, and public life. He helped found the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community (EPIC), serving as a founding board member and later president, building it into an international community that established a durable professional home for ethnographic work beyond academia. During more than twenty years at Intel, anderson built the company’s first ethnographic research capability and served as lead anthropologist embedded in the early planning of the Skylake processor, bringing ethnographic inquiry into core processor definition; with Paul Dourish, he also argued that privacy and security are social and cultural phenomena rather than purely technical ones, a perspective with lasting influence on human-computer interaction and computer security. At Princeton, where he served as the James Wei Professor, he developed new approaches to design research and built academic pathways connecting anthropology, engineering, and design, and he is currently a Senior Fellow at Portland State, integrating ethnographic inquiry into collaborative governance. Across these settings, anderson’s work has helped redefine where anthropology belongs and how it contributes to the contemporary world.
Adam Van Arsdale
AAA Executive Director’s Award
The AAA Executive Director’s Award recognizes individuals whose work demonstrates the power of anthropology in advancing equity, inclusion, and social change. Adam Van Arsdale, a biological anthropologist who has taught at Wellesley College for eighteen years, including over a decade as department chair, receives this year’s award for scholarship and sustained service to the discipline. His research on paleoanthropology examines the dispersal of hominins outside of Africa throughout the Pleistocene, drawing on fieldwork in Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Armenia, alongside work on how evolutionary processes shape biological variation in living humans and how that variation has been understood — both historically through categories like race and in professional scholarship through terms like “population.” A longtime member of the Biological Anthropology Section, Van Arsdale has served on its Executive Board in roles including program chair and president, and has represented biological anthropology on the AAA Executive Board through the Section Assembly Executive Committee, serving as Section Assembly Convener for the past five years.
Vivian K. Berghahn
AAA Executive Director’s Award
The AAA Executive Director’s Award recognizes individuals whose work demonstrates the power of anthropology in advancing equity, inclusion, and social change. Vivian Berghahn, Managing Director of Berghahn Books, an independent scholarly publisher with a longstanding and internationally recognized program in anthropology, receives this year’s award for over 25 years of leadership in academic publishing and a sustained commitment to advancing the discipline’s reach. She provides strategic leadership across the company’s books and journals programs and oversees company-wide initiatives, including the continued development of its open access program. Committed to exploring innovative and equitable models in scholarly publishing, she established Berghahn Open Anthro, a pioneering model for sustainably transitioning anthropology journals to open access, and is a founding member of the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice. Berghahn has held board positions across a number of publishing industry organizations, including AAP-PSP, ALPSP, and, most recently, the OA Book Usage Data Trust.
Elizabeth Chin
AAA Executive Director’s Award
The AAA Executive Director’s Award recognizes individuals whose work demonstrates the power of anthropology in advancing equity, inclusion, and social change. Elizabeth Chin, an anthropologist and ethnographer whose career spanned teaching-heavy institutions — seventeen years at Occidental College followed by eleven years in an MFA program — receives this year’s award for a body of scholarship and editorial leadership marked by rigor and generosity. As Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist from 2020 to 2026, she prioritized supporting authors’ best work with kindness and care. Her research has examined children and childhood, race, and social inequality in the United States and Haiti, and has more recently turned toward arts-based methods including installation, vernacular technology, sewing, and performance. She is the author of Purchasing Power and My Life With Things. Chin left academic employment in 2024 and now works as an independent developmental editor.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology
The Franz Boas Award honors AAA members whose careers reflect extraordinary achievement in service to the anthropological profession. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, the Albert Ray Lang Professor in Stanford’s Department of Anthropology, receives this year’s award for a career spanning medical, psychological, and religious anthropology that she now describes as an anthropology of mind. Her ethnographic work has taken her from the streets of Chicago, where she studied homeless and psychotic women, to Chennai, Accra, and the South Bay, where she has worked with people who hear voices, and to communities of evangelical Christians, Zoroastrians, and practitioners of magic, using phenomenology and comparison as central tools. She is the author of six books, including Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, When God Talks Back, and How God Becomes Real, with Voices forthcoming from Riverhead Penguin in 2027. Her honors include the Grawemeyer Award, the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and election to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Zachary DuBois
The Gender Justice Prize honors scholarship, practice, or advocacy that advances the understanding of gender inequities and pushes forward conversations and actions to address gender-based injustice. L. Zachary DuBois, Associate Professor of Biological Anthropology and Director of the Stress, Adaptation, and Resilience (STAR) Lab at the University of Oregon, receives this year’s prize for nearly 20 years of research on stigma, inequality, resilience, and health in transgender and nonbinary populations. Combining ethnographic interviews with stress biomarkers, his community-grounded, intersectional work demonstrates that gender injustice is not an abstract idea but a bodily experience manifested across multiple biological systems. This research directly informs healthcare and policy, from sexual health indicators and HIV prevention to how anti-transgender laws erode adolescents’ trust in providers. DuBois recently convened an Ernst Strüngmann Forum on Sex and Gender in Scientific Practice, bringing together forty global scholars to examine sex/gender “entanglement” across disciplines, producing the 2025 open-access volume Sex and Gender: Transforming Scientific Practice. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Human Biology, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Psychoneuroendocrinology, Qualitative Health Research, AIDS and Behavior, and Transgender Health, with support from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Leyla Savloff
Gender Justice Prize, Honorable Mention
The Gender Justice Prize honors scholarship, practice, or advocacy that advances the understanding of gender inequities and pushes forward conversations on gender-based injustice. Leyla Savloff, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University, receives honorable mention this year for her research on how feminist collectives in Latin America contest policing techniques and build community-based initiatives to dismantle institutional violence. Her work has appeared in Women’s Studies (2026), the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2023), Disability Studies Quarterly (2022), and Social Text (2020). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Disobedient Desires: Collective Art in Latin America, examining Latin American feminist activism and interdependent visions of justice within and beyond carceral structures.
Susanna Helen Trnka
Presented annually, the AAA President’s Award recognizes extraordinary contributions to anthropology. Susanna Trnka, Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Auckland, receives this year’s award for a body of work examining health and embodiment through the lenses of pain, political violence, respiratory health, movement, and youth mental wellbeing. Her research has spanned political violence and trauma in Fiji, detailed in State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji; the politics of respiratory health across Aotearoa/New Zealand and Central Europe in One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health; embodied movement in the Czech Republic in Traversing: Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic; and, most recently, how young people reconceptualize health through digital technologies in Healthization: Turning Life into Health. She has also published widely on the impact of COVID-19 on state-citizen relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Currently Editor-in-Chief of American Ethnologist, Trnka was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology in Aotearoa and a Fellow of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, with visiting fellowships at Charles University, Prague, and the Czech Academy of Science.
L. L. Wynn
Each year, the AAA President’s Award honors extraordinary contributions to anthropology. L. L. (Lisa) Wynn, Professor of Anthropology in the School of Communications, Society and Culture at Macquarie University in Sydney, receives this year’s award for a career spanning ethnographic and medical anthropology across Egypt and Australia. She is the author of two monographs, including Love, Sex and Desire in Modern Egypt, and co-editor with Angel M. Foster of three books on sexual and reproductive health technologies, most recently Sex in the Middle East and North Africa. Her current research examines the continuum of drugs, supplements, and foods that Australians ingest as part of projects of health and self-making. Wynn is a past president of the Australian Anthropological Society and currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal American Ethnologist.
Jesse Hession Grayman
The AAA President’s Award recognizes extraordinary contributions to anthropology each year. Jesse Hession Grayman, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland and Associate Editor of American Ethnologist, receives this year’s award for his work at the intersections of humanitarianism, global health, development, disaster, and post-conflict recovery. His long-term research in Indonesia, particularly Aceh, examines how communities, states, aid organizations, and civil society respond to crisis, and how people rebuild social life after violence, disaster, and displacement. Grayman earned his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, along with an MPH in Epidemiology and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan, and served as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore before joining Auckland in 2015. His scholarship has shaped debates on mental health and psychosocial intervention, the politics of recovery, maternal and child health, and community-driven development, and he continues this collaborative commitment as a trustee of the Aotearoa New Zealand Development Studies Network and through his editorial work with American Ethnologist.
Emily Metzner
Presented annually, the AAA President’s Award honors extraordinary contributions to anthropology. Emily Metzner, a sociocultural anthropologist whose work examines how whiteness in the United States is sustained through discourses of individualism and responsibility — from addiction treatment to allyship to sustainable consumption — receives this year’s award for her sustained leadership in anthropological advocacy and global knowledge equity. She has served as Co-Chair of AAA’s Anthropology Advocacy Council since 2023, previously held the World Anthropologies seat on AAA’s MPAAC, and now chairs the AAA’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. Metzner also chairs the World Council of Anthropological Associations’ Publishing Council, working to shift the unequal politics of knowledge production within anthropology globally — a commitment rooted in her seven years as editorial assistant for American Anthropologist‘s World Anthropologies section. She is Managing Editor of the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study’s Human-Animal Studies Report and Coordinator of the International Forum for U.S. Studies at Illinois, and teaches undergraduate courses at Western Connecticut State University and Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, VIBRANT, and Anthropen.
Talia Dan-Cohen
The AAA President’s Award is presented annually to honor extraordinary contributions to anthropology. Talia Dan-Cohen, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, receives this year’s award for her scholarship at the intersection of science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, and the anthropology of knowledge and expertise. Her extensive research on the technological frontiers of the biosciences has produced A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles, co-authored with Paul Rabinow, and A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments. She is currently completing a methodological book examining the uses and abuses of “complexity” in anthropology and beyond.
Ady Arguelles-Sabatier
Each year, the AAA President’s Award recognizes extraordinary contributions to anthropology. Ady Arguelles-Sabatier, Executive Director of the American Anthropological Association, receives this year’s award for a career built on organizational leadership and large-scale development work. She previously served as Senior Executive Director of Development, Innovation Philanthropy & FIU Ventures and as Interim Senior Executive Director of Corporate Relations at Florida International University, where she helped the FIU Foundation surpass its $750 million Next Horizon Campaign goal by nearly $100 million. Her earlier roles include Chief Business Development Officer for the Celebration of the Sea Foundation, Director of Sponsorship and Activation for the City of Miami Beach’s historic Centennial celebrations — the largest city activation in Miami Beach’s history — Senior Team Leadership Manager at the Miami Children’s Museum, and Director of Education at Church by the Sea in Bal Harbour, where she led a full restructuring of the children’s educational programming. Her passion for ocean conservancy traces back to an early interest in underwater archaeology.
Matt Artz
The AAA President’s Award is presented annually to honor extraordinary contributions to anthropology. Matt Artz, an anthropologist, designer, and technologist working at the intersection of AI, organizations, and human-centered design, receives this year’s award for building bridges between anthropology and the technology sector. He is the founder of Azimuth Labs, co-editor of the volumes EmTech Anthropology and Anthropology and AI, and host of the Anthropology in Business and Anthro to UX podcasts, and he currently holds the Practicing Professional Anthropology seat on AAA’s Executive Board. In his professional practice, Artz leads enterprise AI research and product development at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, following earlier roles leading AI and digital product development across Fortune 10 companies and venture-funded startups. He teaches AI and Organizations at the University of Pennsylvania and business anthropology and cross-cultural consumer insights at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business, and is a PhD candidate in Techno-Anthropology at Aalborg University, holding degrees spanning applied anthropology, business administration, biotechnology, and computer information systems.
Lee D. Baker
Presented annually, the AAA President’s Award honors extraordinary contributions to anthropology. Lee D. Baker, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Duke University, receives this year’s award for a career spanning scholarship, teaching, and service to the discipline. He is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954, Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience, and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, and has held resident fellowships at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Johns Hopkins’s Institute for Global Studies, the University of Ghana-Legon, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center. Baker has received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award and the AAA’s award for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, served as Dean of Academic Affairs at Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences from 2008 to 2016, and has served as AAA Treasurer since 2023. He is a member of Duke’s Bass Society of Fellows and held the Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Bass Professorship from 2015 to 2020.
Leo Coleman
The AAA President’s Award recognizes extraordinary contributions to anthropology each year. Leo Coleman, Professor & Chair of Social Science & Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and adjunct faculty in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, receives this year’s award for scholarship and sustained service tracing how institutions and infrastructures — from corporations to courts to democratic procedures — inform ethical and social relations. His research spans the history and representation of urban experience, technological networks, and law and constitutionalism across colonial and contemporary contexts, and is reflected in A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi, the forthcoming Some Versions of Legalism, and articles in American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History & Anthropology, among others. Coleman has held grants and fellowships from the British Academy, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and previously taught at Hunter College, CUNY, and The Ohio State University. This year marks two decades of his attendance at AAA annual meetings, during which he has served as co-chair of the Executive Program Committee and as secretary of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology.
D. Ryan Gray
Each year, the AAA President’s Award honors extraordinary contributions to anthropology. D. Ryan Gray, the Richard Wallin Boebel Professor of Anthropology, University Honors Director, and Associate Director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at LSU New Orleans, receives this year’s award for his work in urban historical archaeology and public, collaborative scholarship. His research focuses on New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana, including his book Uprooted: Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods, which examined urban redevelopment in neighborhoods targeted for “slum clearance” in the 1930s and 1940s, and a forthcoming second book on the archaeology of New Orleans co-authored with Shannon Dawdy. Gray regularly trains students through summer field schools and the lab and curation center he runs at LSU New Orleans, and engages the public through projects like gnoarch.com and “The City Beneath the City,” a web-based tour on the New Orleans Historical app. He also works closely with community groups along the stretch of the lower Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley,” advising on cultural resource management and cemetery protection issues, and served as Executive Program Chair for the AAA’s 2025 Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
Liza Grandia
Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology
Established in 1998, the Textor Prize rewards excellent contributions in the use of anthropological perspectives, theories, models, and methods in an anticipatory mode. Liza Grandia, Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, receives this year’s prize for three decades of activist-scholarship with social and Indigenous movements in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, working on biodiversity conservation politics, land grabbing, territorial autonomy, food sovereignty, and pesticides. Her first two books, Tz’aptz’ooqeb’: El Despojo Recurrente al Pueblo Q’eqchi’ and Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders, documented land grabbing triggered by a World Bank project across Q’eqchi’ territory; her advocacy and grassroots research subsequently compelled the World Bank to cancel negotiations for a further $90+ million land administration loan and helped inspire the Q’eqchi’ territorial defense movement known as “Xeel.” Her latest, prize-winning book, Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power, tells the story of how Indigenous movements defied one of the world’s most powerful corporations and won. A survivor of cancer, Long Covid, and a campus injury resulting in multiple chemical sensitivity, Grandia brings a commitment to environmental health and what she calls “canary science” to her work, and received a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for transdisciplinary training in toxicology and public health.
Alejandro Ivan Paz
Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice in Anthropology
This award honors the legacy of Sam Dubal, MD, PhD — anthropologist, activist, medical doctor, professor, and beloved contributor to many intellectual communities — through a gift from the Dubal Family. Alejandro I. Paz, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, receives this year’s award for scholarship and organizing at the intersection of language, citizenship, media, and justice in Palestine/Israel. His current research examines Israeli English online journalism and its impact on North Atlantic reporting, and he has built a partnership with three colleagues and six organizations to study Palestinian journalism abroad and train student journalists in Palestine and Canada to cover the ongoing occupation. His earlier ethnographic research on non-citizen Latin Americans in Israel produced his book Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship and an article that won the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Graduate Student Prize, and his broader work has addressed Israeli settlement in Palestinian East Jerusalem. At the University of Toronto, Paz helped found the Palestine studies initiative Hearing Palestine and was among the founding steering committee members of the Jewish Faculty Network.
Lucy Sdahl Ḵ’awaas Bell
Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice in Anthropology
Made possible by a gift from the Dubal Family, this award honors the legacy of Sam Dubal, MD, PhD — anthropologist, activist, medical doctor, professor, and beloved contributor to many intellectual communities. Dr. Sdahl Ḵ‘awaas (Lucy Bell), a Haida scholar from the Tsiits G’itanee Eagle clan in Old Massett, Haida Gwaii, receives this year’s award for three decades of work transforming museum and research practices through Haida values, responsibility, and accountability. As a founding member of the Haida Repatriation Committee, she has helped lead the return of more than 500 Haida Ancestors and advanced the repatriation of over 12,000 Haida Belongings held in museums worldwide. Her doctoral dissertation, Tla Yahda: Haida Museology Makes Things Right, examines how Haidas have responded to colonial collecting through ceremony, diplomacy, and collective responsibility, offering pathways for anti-colonial transformation within museums; she has also co-authored the Indigenous Repatriation Handbook and Stealing to Healing. Bell teaches decolonizing museum practice at the University of Victoria and, following substantiated findings of racism during her employment at the Royal BC Museum, is now working with her community and the museum to organize a traditional Haida apology feast grounded in Haida laws, accountability, and making things right.
Hanna Garth
Setha M. Low Engaged Anthropology Award
This award, made possible by a gift from AAA Past President Setha M. Low, recognizes anthropologists, groups, or projects that apply anthropology with a deep commitment to social justice and community engagement in addressing a pressing issue facing people and the planet. Hanna Garth, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, receives this year’s award for combining sociocultural and medical anthropology to examine how global industrial food systems affect marginalized communities and how race, regional politics, and class shape access to culturally appropriate meals. She is the author of Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal and Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, which won a best collection award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and was runner-up for the Society for the Study of Social Problems, as well as her most recent book, Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement, released in February 2026. Her research has appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Most recently a senior fellow at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a Rachel Carson Fellow at Chatham University, Garth serves on the boards of the American Ethnological Society and the Association of Black Anthropologists and received the Lee D. Baker Presidential Service Award in 2024.
Manissa Maharawal
Setha M. Low Engaged Anthropology Award
Made possible by a gift from AAA Past President Setha M. Low, this award honors anthropologists, multi-disciplinary groups, or projects that demonstrate a deep commitment to social justice and community engagement in addressing a pressing issue facing people and the planet. Manissa Maharawal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC, receives this year’s award for her ethnographic and activist work on the San Francisco housing crisis. Her first book, Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech Led Gentrification in San Francisco, examines anti-gentrification organizing amid the city’s housing crisis, building on her work as a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and co-founder of the Narratives of Displacement and Resistance Oral History Project. She also co-edited the collaborative atlas Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New York Council for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for Place Culture and Politics, and the National Institutes of Health.
Paula Skye Tallman
Setha M. Low Engaged Anthropology Award
Made possible by a gift from AAA Past President Setha M. Low, this award honors anthropologists, groups, or projects that apply anthropology with deep commitment to social justice and community engagement in addressing a pressing issue facing people and the planet. Paula Skye Tallman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Carolyn Farrell, BVM Endowed Professor of Women and Leadership at Loyola University Chicago, receives her second award of 2026 for translating her research on ecosocial stressors and health disparities among women and children in South America and Southeast Asia into community-engaged action. Central to this work is her long-standing partnership with Peruvian collaborator Lucia Lopez Florez, through which the two co-design research, educational programming, and interventions with educators, non-profits, and government leaders — including gender equity curricula, water access policy efforts, and adolescent leadership programs developed with the Peruvian Ministry of Education. Their next initiative, Water for Wellbeing, will use a $100,000 philanthropic gift to improve water access for more than 2,000 students across ten rural schools in northern Peru, and will be the subject of the forthcoming documentary Water in Our Hands, releasing in early 2027. Tallman and Lopez see anthropology at its strongest when it moves beyond documenting inequities to working alongside communities toward evidence-based, locally meaningful, and sustainable solutions.
Liza Grandia
Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology
Established as a biennial award, the Solon T. Kimball Award honors anthropologists for outstanding recent achievements that have advanced anthropology as an applied science and shaped public policy. Liza Grandia, Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, receives her second award of 2026 for three decades of activist-scholarship with social and Indigenous movements in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, working on biodiversity conservation politics, land grabbing, territorial autonomy, food sovereignty, and pesticides. Her first two books, Tz’aptz’ooqeb’: El Despojo Recurrente al Pueblo Q’eqchi’ and Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders, documented land grabbing triggered by a World Bank project across Q’eqchi’ territory; her advocacy and grassroots research subsequently compelled the World Bank to cancel negotiations for a further $90+ million land administration loan and helped inspire the Q’eqchi’ territorial defense movement known as “Xeel.” Her latest, prize-winning book, Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power, tells the story of how Indigenous movements defied one of the world’s most powerful corporations and won. A survivor of cancer, Long Covid, and a campus injury resulting in multiple chemical sensitivity, Grandia brings a commitment to environmental health and what she calls “canary science” to her work, and received a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for transdisciplinary training in toxicology and public health.
Nancy Marie Mithlo
Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology, Honorable Mention
The Solon T. Kimball Award, given biennially, honors anthropologists for outstanding recent achievements that have advanced anthropology as an applied science and shaped public policy. Nancy Marie Mithlo, Professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies at UCLA, receives honorable mention this year for her scholarship and curatorial practice examining the social production and circulation of American Indian/Indigenous arts and cultures. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Mithlo uses ethnographic case study and institutional critique to expose the politics of memory institutions — museums, archives, film, and fine arts — centering the interior lives and motivations of Native artists within the context of settler colonialism, and her most recent research applies cognitive science approaches to visitor reception studies. A citizen of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache Tribe, she has led nine exhibits at La Biennale di Venezia, the subject of her recent book “Red Skin Dreams”: Twenty Years of Curating Indigenous Art at the Venice Biennale, and co-curated the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s traveling exhibit “For a Love of His People”: The Photography of Horace Poolaw. She has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe Community College, Smith College, California Institute of the Arts, Occidental College, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
TBD
Ohnuki-Tierney Book Award for Historical Anthropology
TBD
SfAA/AAA Margaret Mead Award
TBD
J.I. Staley Prize