Holland Cotter has been a staff art critic at the New York Times since 1998. He has written widely about art and culture around the world. In the 1990s, he introduced readers to a broad range of Asian contemporary art as the first wave of new art from China was building and breaking, and he helped bring contemporary art from India to the attention of a Western audience. Cotter stands out among prominent art critics in the United States for the attention he consistently calls to religion and its roles in artistic production across time, space, and multiple religious traditions. He attends, moreover, to subjects other critics might pass over entirely. Recent critical writing on the Islamic collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, and essays titled "Buddha's Caves," "The Power of Mao, Multiplied," "Double Crescent: Art from Istanbul and New Orleans," "Romare Bearden at the Studio Museum," "Warhol: Headlines at the National Gallery of Art," and "Bernini, The Man of Many Heads," demonstrate that Cotter's attention to, and sophistication about, art’s many connections and exchanges with religion(s) is not an aberration in his work but rather a strong commitment to explore and to educate his publics as well as himself.

The award is selected by the Religion and the Arts Award Jury: Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Norman Girardot, Sally M. Promey, Mia Mochizuki, Christopher Parr, and S. Brent Plate (Chair).