Austrian Museum Award

The Austrian Museum Prize annually honors outstanding achievements in museum work of public and non-profit institutions in Vienna and beyond. With an endowment of €20,000, this award offers a continuously open submission opportunity without a deadline. The aim of the award is to motivate Austrian museums of various sponsorships to contemporarily prepare their collections and exhibition concepts and to implement innovative mediation formats. Criteria such as the originality of the mission statement and collection concept, the quality of the preservation status of the holdings, as well as the overall atmospheric staging are included in the evaluation. Likewise, the ingenuity of the mediation work, the development of a collection-related security concept, and the scholarly processing in relation to the use of funds are recognized.

The award promotes sustainable profiling of museums as lively places of education and discourse. Austrian institutions that advance their collections, special exhibitions, and audience programs with creativity and scholarly foundation are honored by an independent expert jury based on defined evaluation criteria. The Museum Prize aims to provide impetus to make cultural heritage accessible and to strengthen dialogue-oriented mediation approaches. It thus supports the sustainable anchoring of contemporary art and cultural-historical content in society and contributes to securing stable framework conditions for museum work.