Public Humanities Award
2026 Kaplan Institute Public Humanities Award
Salome chasnoff
The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2026 Kaplan Public Humanities Award, Salome Chasnoff!
Salome's award will be presented at the Public Humanities Symposium in a ceremony at 4:00 pm on Friday, May 29, 2026, at the Kaplan Institute (Kresge Hall 2351) immediately following our Public Humanities Showcase.
The annual Kaplan Public Humanities Award recognizes an individual whose humanistic work has had a significant, positive, and lasting impact beyond the university. This year we honor Salome Chasnoff for her work as an activist, filmmaker, installation artist, educator, and curator.
For the past 35 years, she has maintained a collaborative social practice and exhibition career embracing and interrogating the indivisibility of making art and making relationships. They have collaborated with a wide range of under-represented and misrepresented communities including people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ youth, older sex workers, rural hospital workers, families of victims of police killings, and women in the prison system.
Recent works include Code of the Freaks, a feature-length documentary examining the representation of disability in Hollywood cinema from the perspectives of disabled artists and culture critics. Present Absence, a five-channel video installation made with families of people killed by Chicago police, has exhibited in multiple galleries across Chicago and is also a website.
Salome is a founding member, contributing artist, curator, and organizer of PO Box Collective, an intergenerational social practice and creative engagement center in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood with a mission of radical art, mutual aid, and cultural programming. They are also a Senior Lecturer in the Art Education department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Salome’s work has shown across the U.S. and internationally in film festivals, galleries, and museums including Reel Abilities Film Festival; Southern Circuit Tour; DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Cinema Mostra AIDS, Sao Paulo; Feminist Active Documentary Video Festa, Tokyo; Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco; Creative Time’s Democracy in America; Chicago Humanities Festival; Gene Siskel Film Center; and the United Nations. Awards include an Illinois Arts Council Agency Artist Fellowship, a Purpose Prize Fellowship, Women’s eNews Ida B. Wells Bravery in Journalism Award and “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” recognition, the Chicago Foundation for Women Impact Award, and the Illinois Humanities Council Towner Award.
Past Awardees
Past Public Humanities Award recipients have included Dorothy Burge, for activism and advocacy for survivors of police torture in Chicago; Ashley Cheyemi McNeil, for uplifting marginalized voices through work in the independent film community, the TEAACH Act, and with Northwestern undergraduates; and Morris (Dino) Robinson, Jr., for his many years of substantial contributions to the humanities through the Shorefront Legacy Center.