Artnet columnist and senior reporter Katya Kazakina has won the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s 2025 Front Page Award for specialized reporting in arts and entertainment for a second year in a row.
“This award is always such an honor, and to have my reporting recognized at the start of the year gives me the most wonderful boost,” Kazakina said, noting that 2026 marks two decades since she started reporting on the art trade. “I am glad to stay relevant and keep pushing investigative reporting in the art world forward. It’s important.”
Kazakina, who writes the weekly Art Detective column, is known for agenda-setting reporting on the art market and its major players. She won the organization’s recognition this time for her July story “Keeping Up With the Clients: The Art World Lifestyle Can Be Dangerously Alluring.” It probes how dealers, advisors, and other art-world actors sometimes overextend themselves—financially and legally—in an effort to run in the glittering social circles of their wealthy patrons.
The award-winning story was the outgrowth of her bombshell scoop about dueling lawsuits from two ultra-high-end art advisors and former business partners, Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher, which offered glimpses of their luxe lifestyles—and allegations that business funds had been used to sustain them. (Guggenheim and Asher have denied the claims.)
General atmosphere during the Summer Gala by Gala One Saint-Tropez 2025 at Golf Club Saint-Tropez on July 24, 2025, in Gassin, France. Photo: Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images for Amend.
“This award recognizes what makes Katya such a formidable reporter: she doesn’t stop at the scoop,” Naomi Rea, the editor-in-chief of Artnet News, said. “Her follow-up reporting on the Guggenheim-Asher lawsuits shows the persistence and judgment that define great investigative journalism. Richly deserved.”
Kazakina joined Artnet News as a senior reporter in 2021, after nearly 15 years as an art market and wealth reporter at Bloomberg. She has also contributed to the New York Times, Town & Country Magazine, and Elle Decor.
Kazakina has received multiple awards in her time at Artnet. Last year, she nabbed the Deadline Club’s award for arts reporting for “‘It’s Not a Soft Landing’: Contemporary Art Prices Come Crashing Down. Is This the End?,” a story that rocked the trade amid a multi-year market contraction. Also in 2025, she placed second in the business category of the Los Angeles Press Club’s National Arts and Entertainment Awards for “Millennials and Gen Zers Are Coming Into Great Fortunes. What Art Do They Want to Buy?” Her accolades also include the 2023 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award from the L.A. Press Club for her article “The Fight Against Flippers,” which was published as the cover feature of The Artnet Intelligence Report.
Kazakina has won the Newswomen’s Club Front Page Award four times. This year, Kazakina noted that fellow award winners include old friends from different points in her life, including a former classmate at the Columbia Journalism School, Lydia Polgreen (of the New York Times), and former Bloomberg teammates Amanda Gordon and Hema Parmar. “That adds a meaningful dimension for me,” Kazakina said.
Founded in 1922 as the New York Newspaper Woman’s Club in the wake of the women’s suffrage movement and renamed in 1971, the Newswomen’s Club introduced its Front Page Awards in 1937 to raise funds and highlight women writers’ work. The only professional organization exclusively for women journalists in the New York metropolitan area, it has about 250 members.
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