Announcing the Winners Of The MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence

Celebrating Another Year In illustration

The Society of Illustrators is proud to announce the winners of this year’s MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence! These awards recognise the most outstanding work on view at the festival and are open to all artists tabling at the 2025 MoCCA Arts Festival…

This year’s judges included Caroline Cash, Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and creator of Girl in The World (Silver Sprocket); Pilar Newton-Katz, animator and Program Director of the EDM Program in the Art Department at The City College of New York; and Bryce Gold, Head of New Talent at DSTLRY Media and Founder of Pyrite Press.

On Saturday, March 15th, judges received a stipend and spent the day viewing, purchasing, and evaluating artists’ works at the Fest. Each judge selected their five favorite pieces—whether short-form comics, long-form comics, zines, or single images—with the goal of recognizing up to 15 Best in Show works.

Selected winners received The M. Prize, a financial award given in memory of cartoonist Timothy Patrick Moynihan. Now in its 10th year, this prize is made possible through the generosity of Moynihan’s friends and family.

In addition to The M. Prize, winners received an official MoCCA ribbon, a pen tablet courtesy of our sponsor Xencelabs, and inclusion in an Online Gallery, which will be posted in the coming weeks.

The Society of Illustrators is proud to recognize the following artists:

About the Museum of Illustration at the Society of Illustrators and the SI MoCCA Arts Festival. Founded in 1901, the Society of Illustrators is America’s longest-standing nonprofit organization dedicated to the art of illustration. Located on the Upper East Side, SI’s Museum of Illustration advances our mission to promote the art and appreciation of illustration and its history and evolving nature through exhibitions and educational programs.

The SI MoCCA Arts Festival is a 2-day multimedia event. It is NYC’s largest independent comics and cartoon festival, drawing over 8,000 attendees each year. Founded in 2001, The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) was located at 594 Broadway and offered exhibits, education programs, and an annual small-press comic convention known as MoCCA Fest, first held in 2002. In 2012, MoCCA closed its doors and transferred its collection to SI upon condition that a gallery be created in their museum to showcase comic/cartoon art and the MoCCA Fest would continue. Since then, the SI MoCCA Arts Fest has continued to grow into one of the largest independent comic and cartoon festivals nationwide, with over 400 exhibiting artists displaying their work, award-winning honorees speaking about their careers and artistic processes and other featured artists conducting demos, lectures and panels.