Tiffany and CFDA launch new jewelry scholarship and fellowship program

Tiffany & Co. and the Council of Fashion Designers of America widened their jewelry pipeline with a new $25,000 student scholarship and summer internship, pushing the program beyond prestige into practical access. The Tiffany x CFDA Jewelry Design Scholar Award is aimed at early-career students, while a separate designer award will still deliver a $50,000 grant and a yearlong paid fellowship inside Tiffany’s design team.

The move matters because jewelry design careers are notoriously hard to enter without money, studio access and industry contacts. A student may have the eye for proportion, the discipline to understand stone setting and the imagination to shape a wearable object, but still lack the resources to prototype, cast and refine a collection. By pairing cash with an internship, Tiffany is offering something more concrete than visibility: time in a working design department, exposure to commercial standards and a direct line to mentorship.

Applications for the 2026 cycle opened May 10 at 11:59 p.m. and remain open through June 1. The program is open to legal residents of the United States and the District of Columbia who are at least 18 and eligible to work in the U.S. Tiffany and CFDA have positioned the initiative as a way to support both emerging talent and students at the very start of their creative journeys, extending the reach of an award that began as recognition for outstanding American jewelry designers committed to inclusivity.

The second cycle also brings Jameel Mohammed onto the selection committee. Mohammed, founder of the Afrofuturist jewelry brand Khiry, was the inaugural recipient of the Tiffany & Co. x CFDA Jewelry Designer Award and began a one-year paid fellowship in Tiffany’s design department in February 2025. His appointment suggests the program is beginning to build its own lineage, with the first winner now helping shape the next class of talent.

That structure is important. The first finalists were asked to develop three- to five-piece collections, a format that rewards concept, finish and editability as much as flash. In other words, the program is not only looking for beautifully rendered one-offs; it is testing whether a designer can translate an idea into a coherent small collection, the kind of thinking that can eventually support a commercially relevant jewelry line.

CFDA says its Scholarship Fund has already supported more than 400 student designers, and this new award extends that infrastructure into jewelry through a partnership with Tiffany. For a category where craftsmanship is inseparable from economics, that combination of scholarship, internship, grant and fellowship could shape who gets to stay in the field long enough to matter.