Veteran American artist Cindy Sherman has designed the official poster for this year’s Locarno Film Festival, which runs from August 5-15. 

The poster features a character created by Cindy Sherman, rendered in black and white and wrapped in a yellow leopard-spotted headscarf.

Sherman said in a statement that it was a “great honor” to design the 2026 Locarno poster. 

Sherman is one of the most influential artists of her generation, best known for her unique practice of photographing herself as different fictitious characters. She is perhaps best known for her breakout work, Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself as typical female characters from arthouse films and B-movies.

“Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential artists of our generation,” Maja Hoffmann, President of the Locarno Film Festival, said in a statement. “She transformed the way we perceive the world by using the camera not to document reality, but to expose how identity is staged, performed, and shaped by culture.”

Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno Artistic Director, added: “Sherman’s work asserts the inalienable right to self-expression and to the authorship of one’s own narratives in a moment in which alternative realities have increasingly started to replace the truth. In an age marked by global digital narcissism, the body re-emerges as a central medium through which we redefine both the role of images and our relationship to them. Draped in a leopard-patterned fabric, Sherman’s ecstatic gaze conveys a powerful tension between defiance and beauty – one that transcends the image itself, projecting outward into the world with a dreamlike intensity.”