Pratt Institute has named Caleb Callahan, a 2026 BFA Fashion Design graduate, the recipient of the 2026 Material Lab Prize, its annual competition celebrating student material research. The award was announced in Pratt's Daily Hub on October 7, 2026, capping a seventh year for a prize that has become a fixture of the school's interdisciplinary culture. Callahan's winning collection, Cork, Kerala, draws on both Irish and Indian histories of anti-colonial resistance, weaving craft traditions from two continents into what the jury described as an explicitly political, layered collage. Rather than treating materials as neutral surfaces, the collection builds a visual argument about resistance and memory, using recycled matter as its primary language. The jury singled out the collection's authentic synthesis of craft practices, its striking visual execution and its coherent storytelling, praising in particular how discarded materials were transformed into a compelling grammar of dissent. Now in its seventh year, the Material Lab Prize exhibits interdisciplinary student work centered on material experimentation and manipulation, with a jury drawn from designers and design professionals for whom craft and material research are central to their practice. The shortlisted projects remain on view in the 2026 Material Lab Prize Exhibition at the Juliana Curran Terian Design Center Gallery on Pratt's Brooklyn campus through October 17, giving the public a window into how students are rethinking matter as meaning. Also recognized was Athos Argue-Hassanein, BID '27, who received an honorable mention for Slow Light, a floor lamp activated by the placement of hanging stones on plates. Invoking pre-electrical forms of illumination, the piece challenges contemporary disconnection from energy use, and the jury commended its professional execution and its ability to defy expectations about what a lamp can be.