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UK Friends of NMWA is pleased to present the UK shortlist of Women to Watch: A Book Arts Revolution in an exhibition at Christie’s London (8 King Street) from 10-12 February 2026.

Women to Watch is a long-running international programme initiated by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. It champions women artists at pivotal stages in their careers by providing museum visibility on an international platform.

The theme of the 2026/27 Women to Watch exhibition is book arts, and will showcase the work of five contemporary women book artists: artists whose practices are rooted in the material, conceptual, and imaginative possibilities of the book. Following the exhibition, one artist will be chosen to represent the UK in the NMWA’s international Women to Watch exhibition in Washington DC in 2027, putting UK women artists firmly on the international stage.

The programme has an impressive track record: Rose Wylie was one of the earliest UK participants, and her participation in Women to Watch is widely recognised as a key moment in her rise to international prominence.

Curator Welmoet Wartena is working with UK Friends of NMWA, and has nominated five UK artists to form our shortlist.   

Buy tickets or support an artist here.

Read our press release here

We thank for their support:

The UK Shortlist

Tamsin Green

Tamsin Green is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice combines walking, writing, photography and publishing. Working with the structure and materiality of the artists’ book, she explores the ecological relationships between humans and more-than-humans. These works investigate how we come to know the land, how we interpret and represent it, whose paths we trace, and which legacies we carry. She is the founder of manual.editions and the Sustainable Photobook Publishing (SPP) network, and is currently a PhD practice-based researcher at CREAM, University of Westminster. Her work is held in public collections, including The Bodleian Library at Oxford University and National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Larissa Nowicki

Larissa Nowicki is a visual artist. Nowicki employs critical making across art, design, craft, and research, to challenge old paradigms within art history. From old books she materializes new artworks that recombine history, gendered labour, and artistic language into contemporary narratives that foreground the handmade. Larissa Nowicki holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Communication Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, where she is currently a practice-led PhD candidate. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, including Man & Eve Projects (London, UK). She has been awarded multiple residencies at the Albers Foundation and her work is held in the Albers Foundation Archive in Bethany, Connecticut. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, California.

Francisca Prieto

Francisca Prieto is an artist and is interested in the traces of humanity embedded within the disregarded. Her conceptual work explores and combines fragments of history with the architectural principles of space, line, and structure. Prieto’s visual language is the result of considered methodologies where she documents and constructs new layers of meaning to reflect on historical narratives and art theory. Drawing from her own collection of timeworn publications and objects, she seeks to capture their essence, intertwining these fragments charged with humanity and history with intricate metalwork. Francisca Prieto, born in Chile, holds an MA Communication Design from Central Saint Martins (2001). Her work is exhibited in the UK and internationally and held in public collections, including Tate Library Special Collections, the British Library, and the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Batool Showghi

Batool Showghi is a multidisciplinary artist. Showghi’s approach to the artist’s book and her mixed media textile work is concerned with the experience of women and the way in which this experience relates to cultural and religious boundaries. She reflects on themes of turbulence, immigration, disintegration of the family and the experience of displacement. Batool Showghi, born in Iran, holds an MA in Design & Media Arts from the University of Westminster, and a BA (Hons) Fine Art: Printmaking and Photography from London Guildhall University. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally. Her artists’ books are held in public collections, including the British Library and the Tate Library Special Collections.

Rachel Smith

Rachel Smith is an artist who works across art and writing to produce visual poetry and artist-books. Her work ‘flies through’ existing texts, jumbling orders of expected structures, using association, error, and distraction to explore how sense might be sought, rejected, and re-fused. She embraces a meandering lostness, creating space for the as-yet-unthought, and materialising bodily responses to language as a neuro-queer practitioner. Smith gained her PhD in 2020 from Sheffield Hallam University. She co-edits Intergraphia books, an artist publishing project with Emma Bolland. Her work is held in public collections at Tate Library Special Collections, University College London Special Collection, and The Henry Moore Institute Research Library.