CT artists, professors among 2025 Guggenheim Fellows celebrating foundation's 100th anniversary

Yahoo

15-04-2025

The latest group of Guggenheim Fellows was announced on Tuesday, and many on the list have Connecticut connections.
Guggenheim fellowships go to groundbreaking and innovative artists, writers, scholars, scientists and others. The awards were created in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim. Recipients receive a stipend which allows them to pursue their work independently.
According to a release, the 198 recipients, which represent 53 disciplines and artistic fields, were selected from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants and 'were tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.' Many of this year's recipients are affiliated with a college or university — in Connecticut, that includes Yale University, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut — but a third of the list have no such affiliation, including some artists who live or work in the state.
This is the 100th class of Guggenheim fellows. Those connected to Connecticut include:
Composer Katherine Balch, who teaches at the Yale School of Music and received her master's degree from the university, is known for incorporating 'found sounds' and nuanced natural processes in her work.
Molly Brunson is an associate professor in Slavic languages and literature at Yale who also teaches the history of art at the university. Brunson is the author of 'Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890.'
Tom Burr is a conceptual artist who was born in New Haven and still lives and works in Connecticut. Burr had a show at the Wadsworth Atheneum & Museum's prestigious modern art MATRIX space in 2019 and is about to publish a book documenting his Torrington Project, which displayed numerous phases of his work in an abandoned factory building.
Matthew Issac Cohen is a professor of theater arts and performance studies in the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut, where he specializes in Indonesian shadow puppet theater. UConn has one of the top puppetry programs in the country. Cohen is both a scholar of puppet history and a puppeteer himself.
Azza Elsiddique is an installation artist who got her MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art and is still based in New Haven. Last year, Elsiddique had a show at one of the premiere galleries in the country for large-scale installation, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. While she has not had a solo exhibit in Connecticut yet, Elsiddique was part of a group show while she was at Yale and also contributed to the school's online digital art project.
Roger Mathew Grant is a professor of music and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. Grant, who has also taught at Yale, is the author of 'Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical.'
Oona Hathaway is a law professor at the Yale Law School where she is also director of the school's Center for Global Legal Challenges.
Jiliane Jones, a sculptor who teaches at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, lives in New Haven and has earned the Connecticut Commission Fellowship among her many honors.
Other fellows include performers whose work has been performed in the state numerous times such as choreographer Donald Byrd (who spent some time as a student at Yale and later taught both there and at Wesleyan), novelists such as Jonathan Lethem, who not only has visited Connecticut regularly on book tours but whose personal archives reside at Yale's Beinecke Library, as well as essayist and humorist Sloane Crosley, who spoke at Hartford's Mark Twain House & Museum just last month.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation does not itemize the amounts of the stipends given to individuals, but they are said to be in the $30,000 to $45,000 range. In the first century of its existence, the foundation has given more than $400 million to over 19,000 fellows.
For its 100th anniversary, the foundation is launching a new website this month and is the subject of an exhibit in New York City.
'At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers and artists,' said Edward Hirsch, the foundation's president, in the release on Tuesday. 'We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society toward a better and more hopeful future.'