Instagram Doubles Rings Winner Pool to 50 for 2026 Creator Awards

Instagram is doubling its winner pool from 25 to 50 creators for the second edition of Rings, its in-house creator awards, and it has lined up Donatella Versace, A$AP Rocky, Finneas and Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao as judges.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri will sit on the panel himself, alongside designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla — who also designs the physical gold ring each winner receives — professional skier Mikaela Shiffrin, Brazilian street artists OSGEMEOS, dancer and choreographer Charm La'Donna, and Instagram's head of fashion partnerships Eva Chen. Rounding out the roster: GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch, makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench, chef Vikas Khanna, and creator Jack Edwards.

The winners will be announced later this month.

How does the voting work?

No algorithms here. Chen says the judges both nominate and select the winners across every genre and content type on the platform. Beyond the ring itself, honorees receive digital creative tools to distinguish their Instagram profiles.

"It's people we think that are doing interesting things in the world as well as on Instagram, and who've charted their own course," Chen said of the panel's makeup.

She framed the selection logic as icons crowning the next generation: "[The winners are] artists who are on their way to becoming iconic in their fields, chosen by like fellow icons, and so it's not chosen by an algorithm, it is chosen by people in the fields... and so the thing that we are not centering this around is follower count."

That last clause is the quiet rule change worth watching. Follower count — the platform's default currency for a decade and a half — is explicitly off the table as a criterion.

What changes in year two?

Two structural developments define the sophomore edition:

• Scale. The winner pool jumps from 25 creators last year to 50 this year.
• Digital expansion. Chen says Instagram wanted to complement the physical ring with more of a digital presence, expanding beyond the gold ring around a winner's profile to other elements.

The longer-term bet is community-building. Because honorees change every year, Instagram wants Rings to function less like a one-off trophy and more like a rolling society of recognized creators.

"I love watching the conversations where it's like actors on actors, icons on icons, and that's kind of the approach we took," Chen said.

Can an awards program manufacture a network?

Chen's success metric is unusually concrete for a platform of this size. She wants a year-one winner to strike up a conversation with a year-two winner, exchange numbers, start DMing, and collaborate on something.

"Every year the pool is going to increase, and so hopefully with this year we're able to start forging those connections and creating that sense of feeling like you're part of this group of people who have been recognized," she said.

The judging panel itself reads as a proof of concept — a global mix spanning fashion, music, film, sport, food, publishing and visual art, chosen, per Chen, for people "who are moving culture forward in their respective fields and beyond."

For creators, the mechanics are straightforward: no entry machinery, no campaign period, no public vote. Selection rests entirely with fourteen named judges, and the only signal that matters is the work itself — not the follower graph underneath it.