The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the country’s most important programs for artists, intellectuals, scholars, scientists, and more. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 Fellows. This year’s cohort, which recognizes the Foundation’s 100th anniversary, includes six faculty members from Parsons: The New School among the prestigious Fellows.
Huang Ruo, a faculty member in the Mannes School of Music; Caroline Davis, a faculty member in the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music; Selena Roy Kimball, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art Practice in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons; Ester Partegàs, a Fine Arts faculty member at Parsons; Talia Lugacy, Assistant Professor of Screen Studies at Eugene Lang; and Andrew Seth Meier, Associate Professor of Writing at Lang, will all receive a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions,” according to the Foundation.
“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, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”
Composer Huang Ruo has been lauded by The New York Times for ‘a distinctive style.’ His vibrant and inventive musical voice draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz to create a organic integration using a compositional technique he calls ‘Dimensionalism.’ Ruo’s diverse compositional works span from orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, to cross-genre, sound installation, architectural installation, multimedia, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film. His music has been premiered and performed by the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Washington National Opera and others and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch.
Mobile since her birth in Singapore, composer, saxophonist, and vocalist Caroline Davis’s expression covers instrumental outfits to soulful, quirky song writing. As an improviser and saxophonist, she has released six albums under her name and has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star. Davis has shared musical moments with Lee Konitz, Angelica Sanchez, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, Thana Alexa, and Billy Kaye. She sings and writes songs with the experimental R&B band, My Tree. Her composition has led her to be a resident fellow at MacDowell, The Jazz Gallery, and ICE Ensemble Evolution; and she was awarded Jerome Hill, CMA, and NYFA fellowships.
Selena Kimball is a visual artist whose work—large-scale photomontage, installation, and book projects—examines visual perceptions of history by reimagining the photographic collections that document these events. Her collaborations include films and experimental research with visual anthropologist Alyssa Grossman. She has exhibited at the Katonah Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest.
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She is a recent recipient of the Pollock-Krasner award, a Jerome Foundation grant, and two MacDowell fellowships. A native of Maine, she lives and works in New York City where she is co-founder and co-director, with Pascal Glissmann, of the Observational Practices Lab at Parsons.
Born in La Garriga, Barcelona, in 1972, Ester Partegàs is a visual artist and educator who lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas. Her work originates in a fascination with urban space. Generic items, such as plastic crates, shopping bags, tarpaulins, receipts and bar-coded labels speak about a shared social, economic and affective reality that is as mundane and invisible, as it is powerful in determining behaviours. She addresses conflicts that play out in the material world presenting the potential wonder of the immediate. Partegàs’ work has been shown in Sculpture Center, LIC, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Arnolfini Bristol; the Moscow, Athens and Busan Biennials; among others.
Talia Lugacy is a narrative independent director, writer and actor. Her current feature film THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY was released by Warner Media HBO and won the Audience Award at San Francisco Indie Fest, Woods Hole FF, Indie Street, and won Best Narrative Feature at Atlanta Underground, as well as the NYWIFT award for Best Female Director at its NYC premiere, the Urbanworld Film Festival. The film is a hybrid narrative about combat trauma and is a collaboration with veterans of the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam wars. Her previous feature Descent premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival prior to a theatrical release, starred Rosario Dawson and was a New York Times Critics Pick.
Andrew Meier is the author of two previous award-winning works of nonfiction: ‘Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall’ and ‘The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service.’ A former Moscow correspondent for Time, Meier has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, among other national and international publications, for more than two decades. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
Read More:
Jasmeen Dugal is Associate Editor at FashionABC, contributing her insights on fashion, technology, and sustainability. She brings with herself more than two decades of editorial experience, working for national newspapers and luxury magazines in India.
Jasmeen Dugal has worked with exchange4media as a senior writer contributing articles on the country’s advertising and marketing movements, and then with Condenast India as Net Editor where she helmed Vogue India’s official website in terms of design, layout and daily content. Besides this, she is also an entrepreneur running her own luxury portal, Explosivefashion, which highlights the latest in luxury fashion and hospitality.
