The recipients of the 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships, revealed Tuesday (15 April) by the board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, include 32 visual artists—among them Theaster Gates, Sara Cwynar, Lauren Bon and Lucas Blalock—and more than a dozen artists spread across other disciplines from fiction (Miranda July) to film and video (Mungo Thomson) and photography (Farah Al Qasimi and Martine Gutierrez).
The fellowships come with largely unrestricted monies (reportedly ranging from around $30,000 to $45,000), allowing recipients to continue pursuing their work. The 2025 fellows’ announcement comes at a time when such private sources of arts and humanities funding in the US are all the more precious as US President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency cut and attempt to eliminate federal funding agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“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, a poet and the 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.”
The Guggenheim Fellowships, which were awarded to practitioners in 53 disciplines this year, launched in 1925 and have disbursed more than $400m to more than 19,000 fellows over the past century. That history will be the subject of an exhibition at the New York Historical museum, opening later this year.
The 2025 Guggenheim Fellows in fine art are: Lynne Allen, Kamrooz Aram, Teresa Baker, Emily Barker, Lucas Blalock, Lauren Bon, Daniel Anastassov Bozhkov, Katarina Burin, Tom Burr, Carolyn Castaño, York Jiann Chang, Coleman Collins, Sara Cwynar, Azza Elsiddique, Josh Faught, Theaster Gates, Raul Guerrero, Marc Handelman, Hong Hong, Mildred Howard, Jilaine Jones, Selena Roy Kimball, Anna Mayer, Kathleen Marie McShane, Ulrike Mueller, B. Ingrid Olson, Ester Partegàs, Maryam Safajoo, Kyungmi Shin, Molly Springfield, Julie Tolentino and Charisse Pearlina Weston. Fellows in photography are: Marzena Abrahamik, Farah Al Qasimi, Nina Berman, Phil D. Chang, Sabiha Çimen, Denis Defibaugh, Eli Durst, Martine Gutierrez, Tommy Kha, Dionne Lee, Mikael Levin, Miranda Lichtenstein, Justin Maxon, Accra Shepp, Richard Turner Walker, Shoshannah White and Carla Janine Williams.
In all, 198 individuals received Guggenheim Fellowships this year—in a range of disciplines that include biology, climate studies, music composition, physics, religion and more—from among nearly 3,500 applicants. Last year’s fellows included the artists Anna Betbeze, Nicholas Galanin, Park McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady and Dyani White Hawk.