The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester has won the top prize at the Museums Association's Museums Change Lives Awards 2026 for a project that puts people in recovery from addiction at the heart of curating. Recoverist Curators, Re-imagining the World We Live In, developed with Portraits of Recovery, the UK's only visual arts charity specialising in recovery from drug and alcohol use, took the Best Museums Change Lives Project award.

The project challenges the stigma surrounding addiction and recovery by bringing recovery-led voices directly into the gallery's main exhibition spaces. It addresses a lack of recovery narratives in UK galleries, and the judges praised the partnership for integrating those perspectives into the museum's core programme rather than treating them as an add-on.

The panel was particularly struck by the project's approach to the everyday life of the museum, including hosting regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings inside a major public cultural institution. That decision, the judges said, showed a willingness to share the gallery's space and authority with the people the project serves.

The awards were announced at a ceremony at Birmingham Repertory Theatre during the Museums Association's annual conference. The Whitworth's win recognises a model of co-production that other museums are watching closely, and suggests that the most meaningful change in the sector may come from who gets to shape what a gallery shows. Portraits of Recovery, the charity behind the project, works with people in recovery to make art and to challenge the way addiction is talked about. Its partnership with the Whitworth shows how a gallery can hand over space and authority to the people whose stories it is telling, rather than speaking for them.