Three GEM Award Nominees Showcase Stunning Jewelry Design Artistry

The GEM Awards, presented by Jewelers of America, have long served as the industry's most earnest act of recognition: a formal acknowledgment that fine jewelry is not merely commerce but culture. At the ceremony held March 13, 2026, at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City, the category of Jewelry Design brought forward three nominees whose work collectively spans continents, centuries of craft inheritance, and materials that range from the geological to the botanical. They are Silvia Furmanovich, Cece Fein-Hughes of Cece Jewellery, and Catherine Sarr of ALMASIKA, and the pieces associated with their nominations offer a compelling argument for why this award matters.

Silvia Furmanovich: Where Craft Lineage Meets Living Material

Of the three nominees, Silvia Furmanovich arrives with perhaps the most densely layered biography, one that reads less like a résumé than a provenance record. She is a Brazilian designer descended from Italian goldsmiths; her great-grandfather crafted ornaments for the Vatican, a detail that speaks not only to technical pedigree but to an understanding of jewelry as object of meaning rather than ornament alone. She launched her namesake brand in 1998 and continues to work from her São Paulo atelier alongside her three sons, giving the practice a familial continuity that mirrors the generational craft tradition she inherited.

What distinguishes Furmanovich's output is the deliberate introduction of materials that fine jewelry has historically overlooked. Her studio works in marquetry, lacquer, and miniature painting, combining these techniques with natural materials including bamboo, silk, and wood, all set alongside precious gems. The effect is not rustic or artisanal in the way those words are sometimes used dismissively; it is rigorously considered, the result of cultural research and collaboration with artisans worldwide. Jewelers of America, in announcing her nomination, described her as "renowned for transforming global traditions and materials into wearable art," a characterization that holds up against the specifics of her practice.

Her institutional relationships confirm the seriousness with which the broader art world regards her work. Furmanovich has partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, and her pieces appear in museum collections in both New York and Minneapolis. She has earned four Couture Design Awards and received a prior GEM Award nomination in 2019, making this year's recognition a return rather than a debut. That history of nomination without yet having won gives her 2026 candidacy a particular resonance.

Cece Fein-Hughes and the Zome Solara Earrings

Cece Fein-Hughes, whose brand Cece Jewellery earned her a place among the 2026 nominees, is represented in the nomination cycle by work that takes the cosmos as its design vocabulary. The piece that National Jeweler selected as its Piece of the Week in honor of the three nominees is the Zome Solara Earrings, described with the kind of precision that makes you want to hold them: pink tourmalines functioning as planets in orbit around an aquamarine center, the whole composition set in 18-karat rose gold.

The material choices here reward attention. Pink tourmaline and aquamarine are both members of distinct mineral families, their color relationship one of warmth and cool, blush and blue-green, the terrestrial and the oceanic pressed into a celestial metaphor. The 18-karat rose gold setting amplifies the warmth of the tourmalines without competing with the aquamarine's cooler depths, a calibration that suggests a designer with strong instincts for how metals and stones converse. The orbital concept, planets circling a center stone, is a motif with deep roots in jewelry history, but the Zome Solara Earrings, with their specific combination of stones and their evocative name, read as something freshly imagined rather than historically derivative.

Catherine Sarr and ALMASIKA

Catherine Sarr, the founder of ALMASIKA, completes the trio of nominees recognized by Jewelers of America for the 2026 GEM Award for Jewelry Design. ALMASIKA, whose name carries resonances of the Arabic and African roots that have informed Sarr's design philosophy, occupies a distinctive space within the contemporary fine jewelry landscape. Her nomination alongside Furmanovich and Fein-Hughes signals the breadth of approaches the GEM Awards are willing to honor in a single year: heritage craft on one hand, cosmic geometry on another, and in Sarr's work, a practice built around cultural rootedness and architectural clarity.

The GEM Award for Jewelry Design, in gathering these three nominees under a single category, does something useful for the field. It resists the narrowing of "design" to a single aesthetic register and insists instead that excellence can arrive from a São Paulo atelier working in marquetry and bamboo, from a studio translating planetary motion into 18-karat rose gold, and from a designer whose work draws on the deep visual traditions of multiple continents.

The Larger Stage

The ceremony at Cipriani 42nd Street also honored Mark and Candy Udell of London Jewelers with the GEM Award for Lifetime Achievement, a recognition that carries its own weight. The Udell family took over the business after World War II, with Mark and Candy joining in the early 1970s; in 2026, London Jewelers is celebrating a milestone that only a small fraction of family-owned businesses survive to reach.

Jewelers of America announced the full slate of nominees on October 28, 2025, with the event serving its customary role as the industry's opening ceremonial moment of the year. Proceeds from the GEM Awards benefit programs that advance JA's mission to strengthen consumer confidence in fine jewelry and watches, connecting the glamour of a Cipriani gala to something more durable: the ongoing case for why craft, design, and gemological integrity deserve institutional support.

For the three jewelry design nominees, the nomination itself is already a form of curation, a public argument that their work represents the field at its most vital. Whether the award went to Furmanovich's museum-held marquetry work, Fein-Hughes's orbital tourmaline earrings, or Sarr's architecturally grounded ALMASIKA pieces, the category as assembled is a portrait of contemporary fine jewelry design that has earned its place at the table.