Tyler Mitchell Wins $250,000 Don Tyson Prize from Crystal Bridges Museum

Photographer Tyler Mitchell is the sixth winner of the Don Tyson Prize and will receive $250,000 in unrestricted funds.

The award was launched in 2016 as part of the Tyson Scholars of America program, a fellowship endowed by the Arkansas-based food processing giant Tyson Foods and housed at Crystal Bridges in nearby Bentonville. For the first decade, the Don Tyson Prize, named for the company’s former chairman and chief executive who died in 2011, came with a $200,000 award given biannually; starting this year, $250,000 will be awarded annually. The award honors “meaningful contributions to the field of American art.”

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Mitchell, an Atlanta-born, New York–based photographer and video artist, is known for capturing everyday joy in images and installations featuring African American subjects. He is perhaps most famous for shooting Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue magazine’s 2018 September issue; that photo was later acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In 2021, his photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris was also on Vogue’s cover.

Mitchell’s first solo show, “I Can Make You Feel Good,” opened at FOAM, a photography museum in Amsterdam, in 2019, and traveled to the International Center of Photography in New York in 2020. Mitchell joined Jack Shainman Gallery that year, leaving for Gagosian in 2024, where he had solo exhibitions in New York and London in 2025.

“Tyler Mitchell reflects the spirit of the Don Tyson Prize: bold, generous, forward-looking, and culturally consequential,” Olivia Tyson, Don’s granddaughter and president of the Tyson Family Foundation, said a statement. (Olivia is also on the board of the Momentary Council, which advises the Momentary, a contemporary art and music space affiliated with Crystal Bridges.) “[Mitchell’s] work offers a powerful vision of life, beauty, leisure, and belonging.”

The Don Tyson Prize has been awarded to two nonprofits (the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in 2016 and Project Row Houses in 2020) and three artists (Nicholas Galanin, 2024; Deborah Willis, 2022; and vanessa german, 2018) prior to Mitchell.

Willis, a fellow Don Tyson Prize winner and a mentor to Mitchell, who wrote about his work for the New Yorker in 2020, said that Mitchell “captures the diversity and commonality of a community by activating memories of childhood, family, and leisure that form the fabric of social and cultural life.”