Donna Haraway and Italo Rota awarded 2025 Golden Lion Awards for Architecture at Venice Biennale

American philosopher Donna Haraway and Italian architect Italo Rota have been honored with Golden Lion Awards for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Haraway has been awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement while Rota, who died in 2024, was awarded the Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Memorium.

“Donna Haraway is one of the most influential voices in contemporary thought, straddling the social sciences, anthropology, feminist criticism, and the philosophy of technology,” curator Carlo Ratti said announcing the awards. “Over the past four decades, she has explored, in a multidisciplinary manner and with a constant capacity for linguistic invention, issues such as the impact of technological evolution on our biological nature and the ways in which the environmental context of the Chthulucene redefines the boundaries between human and nonhuman.”

Meanwhile, Ratti described Rota as a “forerunner” with a vision of “a world in which the relevance of living entities and biology in general, nature in the broadest possible definition, and finally science and applied technology were united in a single breathing entity. Throughout his life, he had the extraordinary ability to traverse the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the new century by flying above the major styles and cultures of design, establishing himself as one of the most original figures in Italian and European architecture.”

The award ceremony will be held on Saturday 10th May, on the same day that the biennale opens to the public. You can follow our ongoing coverage of the event here.