GIA Graduate Wins Buccellati Foundation Award With Gold Opal Necklace

Catherine "Cathy" Aulick, a graduate of GIA Carlsbad, claimed the ninth and final Gianmaria Buccellati Foundation Award for Excellence in Jewelry Design on February 6 with a hand-rendered gold necklace set with Ethiopian opal and peridot. The award, presented during the GIA Alumni Collective "Night at the Museum" at the Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona, closed out the competition's eight-year run on the final evening of the AGTA 2026 GemFair in Tucson.

Aulick's necklace was chosen from 12 finalists whose work represented GIA campuses in Carlsbad, London, Mumbai, New York, and Taiwan. The judging panel included master goldsmith and author Charles Lewton-Brain, internationally recognized jewelry artist Remy Rotenier, award-winning designer Nanz Aalund, Alishan Halebian of Alishan Jewelry Studio, and Andrew Connors, Director of the Albuquerque Museum — a panel that spanned studio practice, museum scholarship, and design education.

"I want to thank the Buccellati Foundation and GIA for the honor of this award," Aulick said. "Hand rendering has given me a new and beautiful language for communicating my designs." The remark speaks directly to the competition's foundational emphasis: every entry is submitted as a hand rendering, a discipline that asks designers to translate a three-dimensional jewel into precise, luminous illustration before a single gram of gold is set. Ethiopian opal, with its rolling play-of-color and characteristic transparency, is among the more technically demanding stones to render convincingly on paper, which makes the choice both bold and deliberate.

As part of the prize, Aulick will travel to Italy to meet with a representative of the Gianmaria Buccellati Foundation, the family-founded house whose intricate goldwork — particularly its signature honeycomb and tulle textures — has long stood as a benchmark for Italian fine jewelry craftsmanship.

The 2026 award is the last the foundation will present in partnership with GIA. Established in 2018, the program recognized exceptional student design talent across nine consecutive cycles. GIA Chief Learning Officer Cathryn Ramirez acknowledged the partnership's close: "It's been a pleasure collaborating with the Gianmaria Buccellati Foundation and presenting this award each year, recognizing all the wonderful talent in design among GIA students globally." Ramirez also confirmed that GIA is actively developing a successor program, with details to follow in the near future.

The retirement of the Buccellati award closes a chapter that, at its best, argued for hand rendering as more than a curricular exercise. As Susan Jacques noted in celebrating the eighth annual award, the hand renderings produced through the competition are "a reminder of the tangible, personal and physical connection that gems and jewelry spark in each of us." Whether GIA's forthcoming competition preserves that analog discipline or charts a new course in design education remains to be seen, but Aulick's opal necklace stands as a fitting final statement for a program that placed the drawn line at the center of jewelry design.