Rita Rogers, a Fine Art Photography graduate from The Glasgow School of Art’s School of Fine Art, is the recipient of the 2026 Newbery Medal, which was announced today, Friday 10 July. The Bram Stoker Medal for Imaginative Work, a prize founded in 1900, was awarded to Communication Design graduate Olivia Proto.
Rita Rogers, a graduate of Fine Art Photography, was awarded the 2026 Newbery Medal, the School’s highest undergraduate honour. Named after the GSA’s celebrated director Francis ‘Fra’ Newbery, the award is presented each year to the top student graduating from an undergraduate programme at The Glasgow School of Art. The Bram Stoker Medal for Imaginative Work, a prize founded in 1900 and revived as a physical medal in 2025, for the first time since the early 1980s, was awarded to Communication Design graduate Olivia Proto.
Rita Rogers’ photographic project, Rehearsals, explores the unsettling gap between armed conflict and the everyday by documenting the simulated urban environments— replicas of Northern Irish back gardens, Afghan markets, and Eastern European villages— scattered across the British countryside, which function as hyperreal fabrications used as model landscapes for war. Rogers is fascinated by how these fabricated spaces are entirely disassociated from the real places and people they represent.
The core of her practice investigates the “complicit landscapes” of the UK’s geopolitical operations, where violence is rehearsed parallel to our lives. Her work engages with the politics of visibility, examining how seeing functions as a system of control and how power dictates what remains visible. Rita’s images confront questions about the broader structures of power, moving toward a clearer way of seeing that bridges the institutional distance between reality and representation. By documenting the habits and “everydayness” of these rehearsals, she aims to expose systems of violence that have become ordinary, refusing to accept these spaces as neutral or necessary.
“Rita Rogers is a thoroughly deserving recipient of this year’s prestigious Newbury Medal. Her work combines intellectual rigour with exceptional technical accomplishment, producing photographs that sit compellingly between the documentary and the enigmatic.” says Professor Martin Newth, Head of the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art.
“Through a deeply researched exploration of militarised landscapes, she asks profound questions about power, control and the politics of image-making. Just as importantly, Rita has been a generous and inspiring presence within our Fine Art Photography community, contributing as much to the creative culture of the programme as she has gained from it. We are immensely proud of her achievement and look forward to seeing where her practice takes her next.”
View Rita Roger’s graduate exhibition on the 2026 GSA Digital Showcase HERE.
Other finalists for the Newbery Medal each received a Chair’s Medal:
- Kwan (Karl) Ma (Product Design)
- Donald (Donnie) Reid (Mackintosh School of Architecture)
- Rachel Masterman (Interior Design)
- Bea Arden (Sculpture and Environmental Art)
Communication Design graduate Olivia Proto was awarded the Bram Stoker Medal for Imaginative Works. Olivia’s work is focused on human connection, placing people at the heart of every story. Embracing the analogue process of slowing down, she uses medium format photography to create images with care and intention. Deeply inspired by her own family’s hairdressing heritage, Olivia is obsessed by hair’s inextricable link to identity—whether viewed as a quiet presentation or a bold power statement. Her graduate project Strands features both studio portraits and film, featuring seven people’s very different takes on hair, filmed across the U.K. Ultimately, Olivia’s motivation is to seek moments of positivity, hoping her work acts as a reminder that there is profound joy in the simplest of things.
“For Strands, she produced a striking and memorable series of portraits which explore the ways hair is linked to our sense of identity, self-expression and culture.” says Kimberley O’Neill, Lecturer in Communication Design at The Glasgow School of Art.
“In Hair Stories, Olivia brought empathy and insight to her moving image work, gathering personal accounts to uncover the significance hair holds in many people’s lives. Throughout her final year project work, Olivia navigates a rich breadth of ideas whilst never losing the personal connection through the camera.”
View Olivia Proto’s graduate exhibition on the 2026 GSA Digital Showcase HERE
The Bram Stoker Medal is one of the GSA’s most unique and storied traditions, carrying a fascinating link between the GSA and the celebrated author of Dracula. In 1896, Stoker visited the School and spoke of a vampire novel he was struggling to finish, then titled The Un-Dead. His friends Francis “Fra” Newbery, Director of the GSA (1885–1917), and his wife Jessie offered him the use of their cottage at Cruden Bay, where he completed the manuscript—later published as Dracula. To thank them, Stoker founded the medal in 1900, awarding it to GSA students whose work displayed exceptional imagination.
The last physical medals were produced in the 1980s under the tenure of the School’s director Prof. Tony Jones CBE (1980-1986). Now, with this new edition of ten medals, which will be awarded annually until 2032, the Bram Stoker Medal returns to life—uniting over a century of creative heritage with the next generation of imaginative thinkers at The Glasgow School of Art.
View The Glasgow School of Arts 2026 graduating cohort’s degree show projects at gsashowcase.net
For further information contact press@gsa.ac.uk
NOTES FOR EDITORS
About The Glasgow School of Art
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines – ranking 8th in the world and 5th in Europe in the QS World University Rankings 2026. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning, and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world.
Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy, delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3,500 students and staff across architecture, design, digital, fine art, and innovation in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands) and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1,500 students annually.
