2026 Ted Coons Dissertation Prize Announced

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We are pleased to announce that Dr. Adam Antonio Montoya has been awarded the 2026 IDSVA Ted Coons Dissertation Prize for the dissertation On Phantom Country: The Crypt Æsthetics of a Wilder West, directed by Dr. Dejan Lukic. The award was conferred at the IDSVA Commencement ceremony in New York City at the Morgan Library Auditorium on May 3, 2026.

Adam Antonio Montoya was born and raised near Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, between the Uintah Mountains and the Great Basin Desert, surrounded by the layered vistas, histories, and stories of the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest. He received his BFA in Printmaking from the University of Utah and an MFA in Studio Art from Arizona State University.

Currently based in southern Arizona, Montoya continues his explorations of the oddities, subtleties, and grandeur of North America's physical and interior geographies. Through layered abstractions of analog and digital image-making processes and drawing, his art and writing engages themes of mimesis, animism, and deep time. His work at IDSVA examines how the physical and perceptual distances inherent to the American Southwest in particular—its aridity, scale, exposure, and sparsity—function as active aesthetic forces rather than mere background conditions. Drawing on fieldwork across desert and mountain landscapes, he argues that such distances produce a distinct mode of visual contemplation he terms "negative space as presence," where absence, delay, and fragmentation become generative sites for meaning. This framework—which weaves throughout both his images and written words—challenges assumptions about immediacy and wholeness in contemporary image culture, offering instead a poetics of the drawn-out, the partial, and the withheld. His artwork has been exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally, including in Chihuahua, Mexico; Hangzhou, China; Tokyo, Japan; and Dundee, Scotland.

The Ted Coons Dissertation Prize is awarded to one IDSVA graduate each year. The Prize was established in 2015 to acknowledge outstanding IDSVA dissertations that distinguish themselves for their original philosophical approach, scholarly quality, and contribution to new knowledge. It was made possible thanks to a generous donation by Dr. Ted Coons, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Cognition & Perception at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. Professor Ted Coons is a pioneer in the field of neuroscience and a major contributor to early studies in neuroaesthetics.

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