LACMA Names Vija Celmins and Denis Villeneuve for 2026 Art+Film Gala
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has chosen artist Vija Celmins and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve as the honorees for its 2026 Art+Film Gala, the museum announced ahead of the Nov. 7 event. Leonardo DiCaprio and LACMA trustee Eva Chow will return as chairs for the annual fundraiser, which supports the museum’s exhibition, acquisition, and education programs.
The gala has become one of LACMA’s most visible social and philanthropic fixtures, in part because it is built around a specific curatorial idea: the relationship between visual art and film. That framing gives the honorees a particular resonance. Celmins, a Latvian-born American artist (b. 1938), is widely known for painstaking paintings and drawings of oceans, skies, moons, and desert surfaces rendered with a restrained, almost meditative clarity. Villeneuve, the Canadian filmmaker behind the Dune trilogy, brings a different but related sensibility — one grounded in atmosphere, scale, and a careful balance between realism and imagination. He is also set to direct the next James Bond film.
LACMA director and CEO Michael Govan linked those qualities in a statement, describing Celmins’s work and Villeneuve’s films as sharing a contemplative, cerebral register. The pairing suggests a gala less interested in celebrity alone than in the dialogue between image-making disciplines that has long defined the event’s identity.
This year’s gala also arrives at a symbolic moment for the museum. It will be LACMA’s first since the opening of the David Geffen Galleries, the 110,000-square-foot, one-story building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The long-awaited structure opened to the public in May and carried a reported price tag of $724 million.
Last year’s gala honored Ryan Coogler and Mary Corse and raised $6.5 million for the museum, slightly above the $6.4 million collected in 2024. Guests included Cindy Crawford, Cynthia Erivo, and Paris Hilton, and Doja Cat performed.
With the new galleries now open, the 2026 gala will test how LACMA uses its most high-profile evening to project a new chapter for the institution — one that links fundraising, spectacle, and the museum’s evolving public identity.
