2025 Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts: Lauren Raine

Awarded on Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson Arizona

 

Hecate by Lauren Raine
Hecate by Lauren Raine

2025 Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts Awarded to Lauren Raine

This award given in recognition of her decades of creative endeavor as a temple mask-maker, creatrix of art installations, sculptress, ritual theatre performer, painter, author, visionary, and mythographer.

The award letter for Lauren reads in part:

The Masks of the Goddess Project, perhaps your best-known work, consists of stunning masks crafted in the tradition of Balinese temple-masks. These masks were created to reclaim the stories of  female deities from across the world’s cultures, and to empower women to explore each archetype within themselves  With the Masks of the Goddess you collaborated with dancers, ritualists, playwrights, storytellers, priestesses, and activists to bring the Goddesses into the world through the words of the women who wore their masks and wrote their stories. Since their creation in 1998, the Masks of the Goddess have traveled throughout the US and abroad, touching and transforming the lives of hundreds of women.  

Lauren Raine Portrait
Lauren Raine

We honor you also for the shrines and icons you have created. Your ongoing series entitled: Earth Shrine, is a product of your lifelong conversation with the numinous intelligence in nature.

 Out of that conversation you have also created NUMINA: Masks for the Elemental Powers which is your elucidation of the magical sense of communion with place. As you said, “In the past “Nature” was not a “backdrop” or a “resource” – the World was a conversation.” 

In Our Lady of the Shards, you celebrate the forgotten women of history: midwives, wise women, weavers, spinners, Goddesses and priestesses. In Shrine for the Lost: the Sixth Extinction (2022), you created a book, and art installation for the 2023 World Parliament of Religions, emphasizing the magnitude of the loss our biosphere has suffered.

With your four sculptures The Guardians, which symbolize and invoke the Guardians of the Four Directions, as well as the Four Elements, you cast a circle of protection to safeguard us from further ecological loss. In Spider Woman’s Hands you weave, reveal, and remember a vision of a unitive, co-creative world through sculpture, weaving, and performance.

Ancestral Midwives by Lauren Raine

Writing about mythology you have observed: “We’re dancing the future into the world by the stories we tell: like the web of the Native American creatrix Spider Woman, the threads of myth are spun far behind us, and weave their way far into the futures of those not yet born.

“May we dance empathy instead of despair, may we tell the stories that make life sacred and loving, profound and reverent.”

 

 

2025 Kore Award Announcement and Application

Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology 2025

Euthydikos-Kore


The Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology is conferred by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. The award, established in 2009, is funded by the gift of a generous contributor and carries a $500 prize.  The intention behind its founding is to create awareness of excellence in Women and Mythology, and to provide an organizational framework for supporting graduate students in their work.  The award is presented at the biennial international conference, for dissertations completed and defended in 2022- 2024.  Defense must be completed by December 31, 2024.

Applicants can be from any discipline, including but not limited to literature, religious studies, art or art history, classics, anthropology, and communications. Creative dissertations must include significant analysis of mythology in addition to creative work.  Applicants must be members of ASWM at time of submission.

Past winners of this award include Dr. Dawn Work-MaKinne (2010), Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Female Sacred in Germanic Europe, Dr. Shannan Palma (2012), Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture, Dr. Mary Beth Moser (2014), The Everyday Spirituality of Women in the Italian Alps, Dr. Annette Williams (2016), Our Mysterious Mothers: The Primordial Feminine Power of Àjê in the Cosmology, Mythology, and Historical Reality of the West African Yoruba, and Dr. April Heaslip (2018), Regenerating Magdalene: Psyche’s Quest for the Archetypal Bride, and Dr. Monica Mody, (2020), Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands.

See these winning dissertations here.

Applicants must be members of ASWM upon submission of entry.  A letter of support from the dissertation chair/director must accompany the application.  Applicants will be urged to also propose a paper for the national conference, and to appear at and present work at the national conference, if they receive the award.  Conference fees will be waived and housing and meals will be covered by ASWM for the winner.

Schedule for 2025 award:

  • Dissertations completed and defended in 2022-2024
  • Application window: Sept. 16, 2024-January 17, 2025
  • Deadline for completion and defense: December 31, 2024
  • Announcement of award winner: February 14, 2025
  • Awarded at conference Saturday March 29, 2025 , Tucson AZ

Application for Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology

Name:

 Mailing address:

 Email:

 Field of Study:

 Title of Dissertation: 

Date of defense:

Institution degree granted by:

Dissertation advisor’s name:

Dissertation abstract:

 Please submit this form via email to awards@womenandmyth.org, with PDF (preferred) or MSWord attachment of dissertation.  Please have your dissertation director email a letter of support, also in PDF or MSWord, to the same address.

Announcing the 2025 Sarasvati Award for Best Nonfiction Book

The Sarasvati Book Award solicits scholarly nonfiction books published during 2022-2024 in the fields of goddess studies/women and mythology. Named for the Hindu goddess of learning and the creative arts, the award is given by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology to honor outstanding scholarship and presentation. The award will be presented during ASWM’s 2025 conference in Tucson Arizona.

Submissions and book copies must be received by the Awards Committee no later than February 1, 2025. Books must be published in print, rather than only in e-book format. If submitting between January 10 to February 1, publisher may send digital copy of book.  Nominations must come directly from the publisher; authors should contact their publishers to ask them to submit a work for this award. Each publisher may nominate one work published in 2022-2024. Anthologies and self-published books are not eligible for this award.

 Publisher’s submission form: Sarasvati Submission Form (2024)

Publishers may contact submissions@womenandmyth.org .

Previous winners of the Sarasvati Award for Nonfiction:

  • 2022: Eruptions of Inanna:  Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power by Judy Grahn (Nightboat Books)
  • 2018: Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power by Starr Goode (Inner Traditions)
  • 2016: The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor (Princeton)
  • 2014: The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology and the Origins of European Dance by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Norton)
  • 2012: Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor Mair (Cambria Press)

Kore: ASWM’s Award Winning Dissertations

Euthydikos-Kore

The Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology  is conferred by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. The award, established in 2009, is funded by the gift of a generous contributor. The intention behind its founding is to create awareness of excellence in Women and Mythology, and to provide an organizational framework for supporting graduate students in their work. The award is presented at our biennial international conference. 

We are proud to provide access to this groundbreaking scholarship!

Dr. Dawn Work-MaKinne (2010), “Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Female Sacred in Germanic Europe”   Work-MaKinne Dissertation

Dr. Shannan Palma (2012), “Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture”    Palma dissertation

Dr. Mary Beth Moser (2014), “The Everyday Spirituality of Women in the Italian Alps: A Trentino American Woman’s Search for Spiritual Agency, Folk Wisdom, and Ancestral Values”   Moser dissertation

Dr. Annette Williams (2016), “Our Mysterious Mothers: The Primordial Feminine Power of Àjê in the Cosmology, Mythology, and Historical Reality of the West African Yoruba”    Williams dissertation

Dr. April Heaslip (2018), “Regenerating Magdalene: Psyche’s Quest for the Archetypal Bride”   Heaslip dissertation

Dr. Monica Mody (2020) “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands”    

Hallie Iglehart Austen Receives 2023 Demeter Award for Leadership

Hallie Iglehart Austen receives 2023 Demeter Award for Leadership

See video HERE

In 2010, when ASWM held its first biennial international meeting, we established the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality as a lifetime achievement award. At this year’s conference, the recipient ie author-activist Hallie Iglehart Austen. Our letter to her reads as follows:

The 2023 Demeter Award is given in recognition of your decades of visionary scholarship as a founding mother of feminist art, culture, and spiritual practice.  We recognize your work as a teacher, bringing the message about the Goddess through conferences, workshops and writing. We also recognize your commitment to sustainable living, and your activism for the protection of marine life and the ocean. We honor your celebration of the connections among all things, and the hopeful message you bring at this time of crisis.

Your first book, Womenspirit, A Guide to Women’s Wisdom, published in 1983, grew out of your voyage of discovery, promoting the practice of meditation and the creation of a personal mythology. For your second book, The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, you collected remarkable images and symbols of goddesses from world cultures. It has been hailed as “an exultantly female-centric text whose wisdom is universal.” First published in 1991, this beloved book has now been released in a new edition by Monkfish press.

In the 2000s you were inspired by your work with the divine feminine to focus on initiatives for the protection of oceans and sea life. In 2001 you co-founded Seaflow: Protect Our Oceans to educate people about the dangers of active sonars and other ocean noise to whales, dolphins, and all sea life. In 2010 you initiated All One Ocean: Cleaning Up the Oceans, One Beach at a Time. This work of organizing people to come together on local projects of habitat restoration sets an example of how forming grassroots initiatives can make a difference for the fate of the planet, its oceans and sea creatures.

Your work has combined your knowledge of indigenous Goddess wisdom with activism for the environment in a way that is truly inspirational. Our board and members honor you as one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time, and thank you for your scholarly, literary, healing, and cultural leadership.

The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in the field of goddess studies. Previous honorees for the Demeter Award have included Margot Adler (2010), Charlene Spretnak (2012), Jean Shinoda Bolen (2014), Elinor Gadon and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2016), Kathy Jones (2018), and Vicki Noble and Judy Grahn (2020).