The artist and designer Es Devlin is the recipient of the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award within the Arts at MIT. The $100,000 prize, which will likely be presented at a gala in her honor, also includes an artist residency at MIT in spring 2025, where Es Devlin will present her work in a public lecture on May 1, 2025.
Devlin's work explores biodiversity, linguistic diversity, and collective AI-generated poetry, all areas also explored inside the MIT community. She is thought for public art and installations at major museums comparable to Tate Modern, kinetic stage designs for the Metropolitan Opera, the Super Bowl and the Olympics, and monumental stage sculptures for major stadium concert events.
“I'm at all times most motivated by work that I haven't done yet, so I'm incredibly grateful to have that trust and investment in ideas that I haven't done yet,” says Devlin. “I’m honored to receive an award given to so a lot of my heroes and stay up for working closely with the good minds at MIT.”
McDermott Announcement 2025
Video: Art at MIT
“We stay up for presenting Es Devlin with MIT’s highest honor in the humanities. Your work will likely be an inspiration to our students within the fields of visual arts, theater, media and design. Their interest in AI and art is consistent with a serious initiative at MIT addressing the societal impact of GenAI (generative artificial intelligence),” says Philip S. Khoury, MIT vice provost and Ford International Professor of History. “With the opening of a brand new performing arts center this winter and a campus-wide arts festival happening this spring, there couldn’t be a greater time to introduce Es Devlin’s extraordinary artistic practice to MIT’s creative community.”
The Eugene McDermott Award within the Arts at MIT recognizes modern artists working in any field or interdisciplinary activity. The $100,000 prize represents an investment within the recipient's future creative work and just isn’t an award for any specific project or lifetime achievement. The official announcement was made on October 24 on the 51st Annual Meeting of MIT's Council for the Arts. Since its inception in 1974, the prize has been awarded to 38 people working within the performing arts, visual arts and media arts, including authors, art historians and art patrons. Previous winners include Santiago Calatrava, Gustavo Dudamel, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Lepage, Audra McDonald, Suzan-Lori Parks, Bill Viola and Pamela Z.
A special feature of the prize is a brief stay at MIT that features a public presentation of the artist's work, intensive interaction with students and school, and a gala bringing together national and international leaders in the humanities. The goal of the residency is to offer the recipient with unprecedented access to the Institute's creative energy and cutting-edge research and to develop mutually insightful relationships within the MIT community.
The Eugene McDermott Award within the Arts at MIT was established in 1974 by Margaret McDermott (1912–2018) in honor of her husband Eugene McDermott (1899–1973), a co-founder of Texas Instruments and a longtime friend and benefactor of MIT. The prize is awarded by the Council for the Arts at MIT.
The award is given to individuals whose artistic careers and body of labor have achieved the very best distinction of their field and who display that they may proceed to be leaders within the years to come back. The McDermott Award reflects MIT's commitment to taking risks, solving problems, and connecting creative minds across disciplines.
Es Devlin, born in London in 1971, views the audience as a brief society and sometimes invites the general public to take part in community choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations on the Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and Lincoln Center to kinetic stage designs on the Royal Opera House, the National Theater and the Metropolitan Opera, Olympic ceremonies, Super Bowl halftime shows and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for giant stadium concert events.
Devlin is the topic of a serious monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, described by Thames and Hudson as their most complex and sculptural publication up to now, in addition to a retrospective exhibition on the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. In 2020, she was the primary female architect of the British Pavilion at a World's Fair, designing a constructing whose 20-meter-diameter façade used AI to co-author poems with visitors. Her practice was the topic of the 2015 Netflix documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design. She is a member of the Royal Academy of Music, University of the Arts London and a Royal Designer for Industry of the Royal Society of Arts. She has been awarded the London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Kent, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire Award.
