The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced this week the 198 scholars and artists who received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the most coveted honors in the arts.
This is the foundation’s 100th class of fellows. The awardees span 53 disciplines—divided into four categories of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts—and have created projects that “directly respond to timely themes and issues such as climate change, Indigenous studies, identity, democracy and politics, incarceration, and the evolving purpose of community,” per the announcement.
Fellows were chosen from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants, are individually awarded a monetary stipend to further independent work “at the highest level” under “the freest possible conditions.”
Among the winners in the fine arts category are Theaster Gates, Raul Guerrero, Julie Tolentino, Ulrike Mueller, Denis Defibaugh, Sara Cwynar, and Farah Al Qasimi.
Gates, a multidisciplinary artist and educator, has been lauded for deepening culture infrastructure in his native Chicago through projects like the Rebuild Foundation (initially called Dorchester Projects), which has reimagined nearly 40 abandoned buildings in the city’s historically Black South Side as studios, libraries, affordable housing, and more. Guerrero, a long-exhibiting artist the West Coast—he was the recipient of an NEA Photography Fellowship in 1979—makes work about the inextricability of Mexican and Indigenous history from South California. He gained representation with David Kordansky in 2021.
Al Qasimi, one of the youngest fellows in the visual art category at 34, is a photographer from the United Arab Emirates who gained wide recognition for her vivid digital renderings of daily life that make even the mundane a statement on diasporic complexities. She was recognized by the Guggenheim for its 2023 YCC Artist Collaboration.
Also among the winners this year are Teresa Baker, Lucas Blalock, Dionne Lee, Martine Gutierrez, and others of note. Miranda July, an artist and filmmaker who recently a Fondazione Prada survey, won in the fiction category. The full list of fellows is available here.
In its announcement, the foundation reflected that its fellowship program is part of a “century of transformative impact on American intellectual and cultural life.”
The announcement alluded to the upheaval of arts and culture underway in the United States under the Trump administration, which in recent weeks has made dramatic budget funding cuts to federal grant-making agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, and canceled thousands of dollars of existing grants.
“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,” Edward Hirsch, poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said in a statement. “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.”
