Three Gem Award Nominees for Jewelry Design Showcase Stunning Featured Works

The 24th annual GEM Awards sold out Cipriani 42nd Street on March 13, 2026, and the competition for Jewelry Design alone was reason enough to attend. Jewelers of America had announced the three nominees back in October 2025: Silvia Furmanovich, Cece Fein-Hughes of Cece Jewellery, and Catherine Sarr of Almasika. Each designer brought a singular object into the conversation, and National Jeweler honored all three with "Pieces of the Week" features timed to the ceremony. Together, the Horse Mane Earrings, the Underworld Triptych Necklace, and the Invictus Flower Brooch form a kind of cross-section of what fine jewelry can do when it moves beyond ornament into storytelling.

Silvia Furmanovich: Horse Mane Earrings

The case for Furmanovich's win is easier to make when you understand where she comes from. A Brazilian designer descended from Italian goldsmiths, her lineage runs deep enough that her great-grandfather crafted ornaments for the Vatican. She launched her namesake brand in 1998 and has spent nearly three decades building an atelier in São Paulo where she works alongside her three sons. That's not a marketing detail; it shapes how the work gets made.

Furmanovich's practice draws from marquetry, lacquer, and miniature painting, layered with natural materials including bamboo, silk, and wood, all set against or alongside precious gems. The result is jewelry that reads more like portable museum objects than wearable luxury. That description isn't metaphorical: her work has entered museum collections in New York and Minneapolis, and she has partnered directly with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts. She has earned four Couture Design Awards and received her first GEM Award nomination in 2019, making this year's win a long time coming.

The Horse Mane Earrings, the piece National Jeweler selected to represent her nomination, carries that same sensibility. The name alone suggests movement and texture, the kind of organic reference that anchors Furmanovich's approach to materials. The award was presented on the night by Beth Hutchens of FoundRae, the 2025 Jewelry Design winner, passing a kind of torch between two designers whose work insists on craft as a living practice.

Cece Fein-Hughes: Underworld Triptych Necklace

Cece Fein-Hughes and her brand Cece Jewellery represent a different register entirely. The piece chosen to honor her nomination, the Underworld Triptych Necklace, signals ambition in its title alone. A triptych is a structural and narrative device; it implies panels, sequence, layers of meaning intended to be read in relation to one another. In locket form, that concept becomes intimate.

The specific detail that National Jeweler preserved about this piece is precise and striking: the locket opens to reveal an illustration flanked by the words "Sacred Love" engraved on the doors. The pairing of "Underworld" in the title with "Sacred Love" inside the piece creates a deliberate tension, as if the necklace holds two worlds in suspension. The engraving is not incidental. It transforms what might otherwise be a decorative object into a keepsake with a defined emotional architecture. You close the locket and carry the inscription against your sternum; you open it and the illustration is waiting.

The supplied research on Fein-Hughes's background is limited beyond the nomination itself, which speaks to an emerging profile in the international fine jewelry conversation rather than a diminished one. Her presence among the 2026 GEM nominees places her alongside a designer with nearly 30 years of practice and international museum partnerships, which is its own form of recognition.

Catherine Sarr: Invictus Flower Brooch

Catherine Sarr's Almasika brand contributed the third piece: the Invictus Flower Brooch. The name Invictus, Latin for unconquered, gives the brooch an immediate declarative quality that distinguishes it from the more naturalistic language of Furmanovich's earrings or the mythological framing of Fein-Hughes's necklace. A flower rendered under that name is not simply decorative; the title reframes the botanical form as something resilient, defiant even.

Brooches occupy a particular and underappreciated territory in fine jewelry. They require a commitment from the wearer that rings and earrings do not: you have to choose to display them, to accept that the piece will draw the eye to a specific part of your body or garment. A flower brooch named Invictus asks something of whoever pins it on. The research provides the piece's title and Sarr's nomination through Almasika, connecting her work to a design conversation happening at the highest institutional level of the industry. As with Fein-Hughes, deeper biographical detail on Sarr warrants a direct conversation with the designer and the Almasika brand.

The Broader Evening

The Jewelry Design category was not the only one drawing attention at Cipriani. Mark and Candy Udell of London Jewelers received the GEM Award for Lifetime Achievement, a recognition that carries particular weight given the Udell family's decades in the industry. Ana Khouri took the GEM Award for High Jewelry Excellence, with her award presented by Linda Evangelista. Thomas Waller won Media Excellence, and Jessica McCormack took Retail Innovation, her award accepted on stage by Leonie Brantberg.

The David Yurman GEM Awards Grant went to Johnny Nelson, an emerging designer whose work David Yurman described in the event's press materials as rooted in personal meaning: "What truly sets Johnny apart is the meaning embedded in his work. His designs fuse his own heritage, identity, and artistry, creating pieces that spark conversation and invite reflection."

The GEM Awards are organized by Jewelers of America, whose mission centers on improving consumer confidence in fine jewelry and watches. Proceeds from the ceremony support JA's industry programs directly. That the sold-out 24th annual event took place in the same week that the industry was monitoring tariff increases and watching senior figures like GIA's Tom Moses transition out of decades-long roles underscores how much the awards serve as a counterweight: an annual insistence that craft, design, and provenance still matter in a business that can too easily reduce itself to margin and volume.

All three nominated pieces for Jewelry Design, a pair of earrings that evokes organic movement, a locket that holds sacred language inside a mythological frame, and a brooch that names a flower unconquered, make the case that the category deserved every one of its three contenders.