Ten Columbia Alumni and Professors Awarded Guggenheim Fellowships

This year's Guggenheim Fellowship recipients include five School of the Arts Alumni a well as five alumni and faculty throughout Columbia. They are: Alexandra Kleeman '12, Dinaw Mengestu '05, Anna Craycroft '04, Rebecca Donner '01, and Allison Funk '78, as well as Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Alumnus Fred Turner '85, Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute Hernan Diaz, and Columbia Professors Rosalind C. Morris, Stathis Gourgouris, and Christopher Peacocke.

Established in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation seeks to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions." Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals. Guggenheim fellows have won the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other prestigious awards.

The 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship was awarded to 180 individuals after a rigorous application and peer review process of around 2500 applicants. 

"It is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.

Alexandra Kleeman '12 was awarded a Fiction Fellowship. She is the author of the novel Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), the short story collection Intimations (Harper 2016), and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize.

Dinaw Mengestu '05 received a Fiction Fellowship. Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. 

Rebecca Donner '01 was awarded a Nonfiction Fellowship. Her biography All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (Little Brown and Co, 2021) won a 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and was named a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of 2021, among many other honors. She is also the author of a novel, Sunset Terrace (MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2003) and a graphic novel about ecoterrorism, Burnout (Minx, 2008). Donner was a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. 

Allison Funk '78 won a Poetry Fellowship. Funk is the author of five books of poems, including Wonder Rooms (Parlor Press, 2015) and The Visible Woman (Parlor Press, 2021). She is also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. Funk is a Professor Emerita at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Anna Craycroft '04 received a Fine Arts Fellowship. Craycroft has held solo exhibitions with major institutions including the New Museum in New York, PICA in Portland, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Ben Maltz Gallery, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Her work has also been exhibited at REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles, Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, ICA in Boston, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and MoMA PS1 in New York. She has been commissioned for public sculptures by institutions including deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Art in General in New York, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, LMCC in New York, and Den Haag Sculptuur in the Netherlands. 

Congratulations to this year's recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship!