Opening Doors: Celebrating the Women in Drupal Award Winners 2026

Highlights from the Women in Drupal Award at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.

There’s something special about bringing together women from across the Drupal community to celebrate their achievements, share their experiences and make new connections.

At DrupalCon Rotterdam, the Women in Drupal Award returned for 2026—and this year, the conversations and connections around the awards felt every bit as important as the recognition itself.

We celebrated three women whose contributions have made a meaningful impact on Drupal and the community around it, heard the stories behind their achievements, and brought women from across the ecosystem together to connect over our Women in Drupal networking lunch.

And throughout it all, one idea kept coming back: the importance of opening doors.

The Difference One Person Can Make

Before we revealed this year’s winners, Lotus Child, Director of Digital Experience at JAKALA, shared her own story.

At 12, Lotus decided she wanted to become an engineer. Not because engineering had always been part of some carefully mapped-out career plan, but because a teacher noticed something in her.

He saw that she was good at maths. That she liked understanding how things worked. That she liked to build. And he told her about a school where teenagers could major in engineering — an opportunity she hadn’t known existed until somebody took the time to show it to her.

He opened a door.

What came afterwards wasn’t always as encouraging.

Lotus found herself in classrooms where boys vastly outnumbered girls and where she was sometimes made to feel that she didn’t belong, despite consistently excelling in her work. Later in her career, she would encounter more rooms where women were significantly underrepresented.

Looking back, however, she doesn’t see the lesson of those experiences as simply learning to be tougher. Instead, she spoke about the influence each of us can have on the people around us.

We can be the person who helps somebody see an opportunity they couldn’t see before. Who encourages them. Who makes space for their ideas. Who tells them that they belong.

Or, as Lotus put it, we can 'open a door someone didn’t know was there.'

It was a particularly fitting thought with which to begin this year’s Women in Drupal celebration.

Celebrating the Women in Drupal Award 2026 Winners

This year, we moved away from individual award categories to recognise the many different ways women make an impact across Drupal.

Our three winners couldn’t demonstrate that better.

Antonella Severo, Senior Product Leader, CMS Platforms, Marketing, Sales and eCommerce at Nestlé

Antonella was recognised for her active involvement in the Drupal community and her work on the Success Stories track, helping to shine a light on Drupal projects and the people and teams behind them.

Her contribution is a reminder that thriving open-source communities aren’t built through code alone. They’re strengthened by the people who tell their stories, share what others have learned and make great work visible.

Nikita Aswani, Senior Front-end Developer at Open Social

Nikita was recognised for her technical contributions to Drupal as well as her role on the Drupal Asia steering committee.

Her work reflects two sides of what makes an open-source community flourish: contributing to the technology itself while also helping create the spaces and opportunities that bring its community together.

Rachel Lawson, Lead Drupal Developer at Cambridge University Press & Assessment

Rachel was recognised for her longstanding mentorship and engagement with the Drupal community, as well as her former role as Community Liaison at the Drupal Association.

Throughout her involvement with Drupal, Rachel has helped others participate, contribute and find their place in the community—exactly the kind of impact Women in Drupal was created to recognise.

The Stories Behind the Achievements

We want to do more than announce our winners.

Antonella, Nikita and Rachel joined Baddý Sonja Breidert, CEO and Co-Founder of 1xINTERNET, on stage to share some of their own stories and answer questions about their experiences, giving everyone in the room an opportunity to get to know the women behind the achievements, something we believe is important.

Awards can recognise a contribution, but hearing from the person behind it gives that recognition another dimension.

Careers and communities aren’t built from a neat succession of milestones. They’re shaped by people, opportunities, challenges, decisions and moments of encouragement along the way.

Giving our winners the space to talk about those experiences made the celebration feel less like an awards ceremony and more like a conversation—one that the whole room could be part of.

It also brought us back to something Lotus had said earlier.

For much of her own career, she explained, she had allowed her work to speak for itself rather than speaking about her achievements. But achievements deserve to be heard.

Women in Drupal is one small way of making sure they are.

Coming Together at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026

The conversations didn’t stop when the awards did.

Our Women in Drupal networking lunch brought together women from across DrupalCon Rotterdam to meet, talk, share experiences and make new connections.

It's a simple event, and there's no pressure to turn every conversation into a business opportunity. It's just a room full of women from across the Drupal ecosystem, sitting down together over lunch.

Some were catching up with people they already knew. Others were meeting for the first time. Conversations moved between Drupal, careers, projects, challenges, ideas and everything in between. We hope this space allows women to create a sense of connection that matters.

Large events like DrupalCon give us an incredible opportunity to bring a global community together, but sometimes it’s the smaller conversations within them that stay with us: meeting someone working through the same challenge as you, being introduced to someone whose work you’ve followed, finding a potential mentor or collaborator, or simply discovering another friendly face you’ll recognise at the next event.

Sometimes opening a door is a big gesture.

Sometimes it’s simply saying, “Come and sit with us.”

Recognition Creates Visibility. Connection Creates Possibility.

Towards the end of her talk, Lotus described the Women in Drupal Award as 'a door held open on purpose' — a way of saying, out loud: we see you, you belong here, keep going.

That feels like a fitting way to describe what we saw in Rotterdam.

Women in Drupal is about celebrating people who have already made an impact. But recognition can do something else too--it can make contributions visible. It can introduce us to people whose work we didn’t know before. It can give someone else a person to learn from, connect with or look up to. And it can remind people across our community that there is a place for them here.

One person opens a door. Someone else walks through it. And, in time, they may hold it open for the person coming behind them.

Congratulations to Antonella, Nikita and Rachel, our Women in Drupal Award winners for 2026.

And thank you to Lotus, Baddy, and to everyone who joined us for the award and networking lunch, and to all the people across the Drupal community who keep opening doors for others.

We’ll see you at the next one.