Open Call for Nominations: Maker Behind the Maker Award 2025 

This year will mark the 5th iteration of the Maker Behind the Maker Award. This Award honors people whose craftsmanship and supportive collaboration have been essential for a visual artist to best materialize their work.

Starting this year, we will organize The MELLYs, our newly envisioned awards celebration and benefit dinner. The MELLYs is an evening devoted to honoring the individuals whose work, often behind the scenes, sustains and strengthens the art world. By presenting three award categories —Maker Behind the Maker, Behind the Lens (formerly known as the Berry Koedam Award), and Visionary 010—we shine a light on collaboration and dedication that often goes unrecognized. The event will take place on Thursday, 27 November 2025, at Arminius in Rotterdam.

Visual artists with an experience of more than five years of creating artworks and projects are invited to nominate one or more individuals for this award. Nominations can only be made for a craftsperson living in The Netherlands. To submit a nomination, artists are asked to complete a short form, including a brief statement explaining why or how the nominee played a key role in the realization of one or more artworks or projects.

The closing date for nominations in this open call is Tuesday 1 July 2025, time: 23:59 CET.

Thanks to the continued support of the Mondriaan Fund and Stichting Stokroos, the prize money has been increased to €25,000. This significant contribution reflects our shared commitment to recognizing those whose devotion uplifts the art ecosystem. Nominations will be reviewed and winners selected by an independent three-member jury, which will convene in August 2025 at Kunstinstituut Melly. The jury members of the 2025 edition will be Charly van Rest (artist and winner Maker Behind the Maker Award 2021), Amira Gad (Curator Modern & Contemporary Art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) and Ron Bernstein (Head of Material Matters at Jan van Eyck Academy). The jury will be chaired by Gabi Ngcobo, the Director of Kunstinstituut Melly.

For the purpose of this award, ‘’craft’’ can range from manual to intellectual expertise: a craftsperson may be, for example, a fabricator, a technician, an interpreter, an editor, or someone with certain expertise which helps make artworks or projects come into fruition.
The nominated person can either work independently or in a company/institution; the person may also be a visual artist; the person may be a one-time hire or a long-standing collaborator. Nominators can present more than one nominee; each nomination has to be sent in through an individual form.

Previous winners were: Charly van Rest (2021), Struktuur 68 (2022), Karen Zeedijk (2023), and Marlies Crooijmans (2024).