Shaping the Now: Montreal’s Andrea Peña Wins Chanel’s Global Art Prize
The future of culture.
Andrea Peña’s latest honour comes not from the contemporary dance world but from fashion’s most powerful patron. The Montreal-based choreographer and scenic designer has been named one of 10 winners of the 2026 Chanel Next Prize, a 100,000-euro award and two-year mentorship program created by the Chanel Culture Fund to spotlight creatives “shaping the now and defining the next” in global culture. Recently handed out in Paris, the biennial prize recognizes artists across visual art, film, sound, fashion, and performance. This year’s cohort spans 10 countries, with Peña the Canada-based voice of dance and embodied research.
“I am interested in how choreographic universes can exist in museums, in hybrid cultural spaces, in dialogue with fashion and technology,” Peña says. “How we can see choreography as embodied knowledge, beyond dancing, with relevance in fields well beyond the arts.”
Born in Bogotá and raised in Colombia and Canada, Peña directs Andrea Peña & Artists, the company she founded in 2014. Her choreography draws on Colombian ancestral memory and the histories of Latin America and other postcolonial regions, but her stages are far from folkloric. A background that braids ballet training, a performing career with Ballets Jazz Montréal, and studies in industrial design and fashion feeds a practice in which dancers build and dismantle structures, trash and reassemble scenery, and treat clothing—or its absence—as part of a larger argument about how societies are built and undone.
Two works make the stakes of her practice concrete. Children of Land, created for Ballet Edmonton, threaded magical realism and protest energy through taut group formations and sculptural gesture. Bogotá, the post-Andean, baroque “performative event” that opened London’s Dance Umbrella in 2025, placed near-naked dancers in a liminal landscape of metal frames, scaffolding, and black speaker stacks, where sweat-soaked ritual oscillated between rave, ritual, and revolt.
Described by Biennale Danza jury president Wayne McGregor as “a radical and innovative proposal” that explores death, resilience, and postcolonial identity through a hybrid, “posthuman” lens, Bogotá brought Peña international recognition when she became the first foreign winner of the Venice residency competition. McGregor is one of the most influential choreographers working today. His advocacy signals to the wider field that Peña’s collision of queer Latin American philosophies, design thinking, and uncompromising physicality is not a marginal experiment but a force reshaping the mainstream of contemporary dance.
The Chanel Next Prize now gives that trajectory more room to grow. Rather than commissioning a single outcome, the residency offers time and support to artists to deepen their research and test it at a larger scale. For Peña, it is a chance to push further into an aesthetic where “mythologies, aesthetics of excess and fragility, relationship to spirituality, hybridity, and collective memory are not peripheral gestures but rather are central to the future of contemporary culture.”
