A composer, a visual artist, an art historian, and playwright are among the 188 individuals from 84 academic institutions who have been awarded the prestigious fellowships.
A genre-busting composer, a multimedia visual artist whose work ranges from site-specific installations to photography, an art historian interested in how art shapes human thought and a playwright and translator are the NYU faculty awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships.
NYU’s Julia Wolfe, Shadi Harouni, Alexander Nagel, Caridad Svich and 184 other scholars and artists have been selected from more than 3,000 applicants by John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for this year’s awards. The 2024 Fellows represent 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields and range in age from 28 to 89.
“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers, and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
The 2024 Fellows include scholars, artists, novelists, poets, historians, choreographers, environmentalists, and data scientists. They are engaged in a broad range of issues, including climate change, community, identity, democracy, disability activism, and incarceration. Since its founding in 1925, the foundation has awarded more than $400 million to some 19,000 Fellows.
This year’s NYU Faculty Guggenheim Fellows are:
Shadi Harouni is an assistant professor and head of photography and video in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. As an artist and filmmaker, Harouni’s work is centered on histories of dissent, chiefly in the traditional Kurdish homelands, connecting quiet personal acts of resistance to global mass movements. Her art has been exhibited in museums and biennials worldwide. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, the Harpo Foundation in New York and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy.
Courtesy of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
Alexander Nagel, the Craig Hugh Smyth Professor of Fine Arts at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, has wide-ranging research interests, mostly concerned with how art allows humans to think through time and find orientation in the world. He is the author or editor of 10 books, including Amerasia (Princeton University Press, 2023), co-written with Elizabeth Horodowich, The Expanded Field of Conservation (Yale University Press, 2023), co-edited with Caroline Fowler, and Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (Thames & Hudson, 2012).
Julia Wolfe is an internationally renowned composer who is professor of Music Composition and artistic director of Music Composition in the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions at NYU Steinhardt. Wolfe won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music and is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. Her most recent compositions include unEarth, commissioned and premiered last June by the New York Philharmonic, and Her Story, a semi-staged work for orchestra and women’s choir. Co-founder of the music collective, Bang on a Can, she has worked with giants of art, theater, and music and her work has been performed around the world.
Photo by Peter Serling
Caridad Svich is an award-winning playwright and translator who has penned more than 40 full-length plays and 15 translations. Svich is an adjunct currently teaching a playwriting course in the Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing. Svich is the winner of an OBIE, National Latino Playwrights Award and was a finalist for the PEN Center Literary Awards in Drama.
A complete list of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows may be found on the Guggenheim Foundation’s website.
Editor’s Note:
Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the world’s foremost research universities (with more than $1 billion per year in research expenditures, it is ranked seventh among private research universities) and is a member of the selective Association of American Universities. NYU has degree-granting university campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai; has 13 other global academic sites, including London, Paris, Florence, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, and Accra, and US sites in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, CA, and Tulsa, OK; and both sends more students to study abroad and educates more international students than any other U.S. college or university. Through its numerous schools and colleges, NYU is a leader in conducting research and providing education in the arts and sciences, law, medicine, business, dentistry, engineering, education, nursing, the cinematic and performing arts, music and studio arts, public administration, social work, public health, and professional studies, among other areas.