A permanent record of the minds shaping the next century.
The Latimer Prize is an annual global honor for Black innovators whose work has bent a discipline, and the world, toward what comes next. It is presented once each year, to a class of laureates across ten disciplines, at Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
Why this prize, why now
An institution that should have existed a century ago.
For four hundred years, the most consequential Black scientists, designers, builders, storytellers, and stewards have shaped the modern world without the institutions their work deserved. Their breakthroughs were absorbed; their names were not. The Latimer Prize is a quiet, durable correction.
It is named for Lewis Howard Latimer, the inventor and draftsman who drew the original telephone for Bell, engineered the carbon filament that made the incandescent lamp affordable, and stood as the only Black member of the Edison Pioneers. His standard, rigor without spectacle, is the standard of the Prize.
We do not award attention. We award the work, and we keep the record.
The honor
What it means to be named a Latimer Laureate.
Each laureate receives a hand-cast medal in bronze and black enamel, a permanent entry in the Latimer Register held with the Smithsonian, an unrestricted honorarium meant to free a year of work, and a recorded conversation that becomes the spine of the public archive.
The Prize is conferred for life. Laureates select every future class, an unbroken chain of judgment that deepens, rather than expands, with every year.
The disciplines
Ten chairs. One class. Once a year.
The Prize is awarded across the ten disciplines that build a civilization: sciences and mathematics, letters and thought, design and architecture, music and sonic arts, cinema and image, technology and engineering, social architecture, the arts, world changer innovation, and the quiet practice of mentorship.
An additional chair, the Latimer Seat, is held for a figure whose work exceeds any single discipline. In some years it is left vacant. Vacancy is its own form of honor.
The method
No campaigns. No submissions of self.
The Prize accepts no self-nominations and no campaigns. Each spring a small confidential body, past laureates and senior scholars appointed by the Board, proposes a longlist. The longlist is narrowed across three rounds of private deliberation, with counsel from external readers in every discipline. The class is announced only once it is final.
The test is unromantic: the work must have changed its discipline, and the discipline must be one the world cannot do without.
Continue
Read the inaugural class of 2027.
The first class, laureates across ten disciplines, named at Cooper Hewitt, is now public record.
The Laureates