NEW YORK CITY: The board of trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists, including five in the areas of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Drama and Performance Art.
“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation, in a statement, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the foundation to help the Fellows do what they were meant to do.”
The 2021 fellows were choses through a rigorous peer-review process from almost 3,000 applicants. Included in this years fellows are L. M. Bogad, Rebecca Schneider, Mike Lew, Kaneza Schaal, and Sarah Cameron Sunde.
L.M. Bogad, based in Berkeley, Calif., is an author, performer, and the founding director of the Center for Tactical Performance. He is also a professor of political performance at the University of California at Davis. Bogad has led tactical performance workshops in Egypt, Iceland, Argentina, Latvia, and across the United States and Europe, and he has performed on picket lines at Saint Francis, the Angry Banker, and Sam Walton. As a writer, Bogad’s plays have covered topics like the Egyptian revolution, the Haymarket Square Riot, the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities, the Pinochet coup in Chile, and global climate chaos.
Based in Warwick, R.I., Rebecca Schneider is a professor in the department of modern culture and media at Brown University, where she also teaches performance studies, decolonial methods in media and live arts, prehistories of the screen, and theories of intermedia. Schneider has served as consortium editor for TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies and she has authored three books: The Explicit Body in Performance; Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reproduction; and Theatre and History. Schneider has delivered lectures at the Guggenheim in New York, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Centre de la Dance in Paris, and the Point Art Center in Cyprus as well as at universities around the world.
Brooklyn-based Mike Lew‘s plays include Teenage Dick, Tiger Style!, Bike America, microcrisis, Moustache Guys, and the book to the musical Bhangin’ It. Lew is a Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Ma-Yi, where he is also a former co-director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and former La Jolla Playhouse Artist-in-Residence. His honors include Lark Venturous and NYFA fellowships and the Kleban, PEN Emerging Playwright, Lanford Wilson, Helen Merrill, Heideman, and Kendeda awards. Lew is also a Tony voter, Dramatists Guild Council member, and resident of New Dramatists.
Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based theatre artists with a recent work, Jack &, showing in BAM’s 2018 Next Wave Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and with its co-commissioners Walker Arts Center, REDCAT, On The Boards, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. She has received a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration & Public Space Fellowship, 2018 Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, 2017 MAP Fund Award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and was an Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. Other works include Go Forth, Cartography, and Maze. Her work with the Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, the Whitney Museum, and MoMA.
Sarah Cameron Sunde, based in New York City, is an interdisciplinary artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art. She is the creator of 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea, an ongoing work spanning over seven years and six continents, and instigator/co-curator of Works on Water, a new triennial and artist-driven experimental organization dedicated to art that is made on, in, and with the water. Sunde served as deputy artistic director of New Georges for 16 years, co-founded the live art collective Lydian Junction and theatre company Oslo Elsewhere, and is known internationally as Jon Fosse’s American director and translator. She holds a B.A. in theatre from UCLA and an M.F.A. in digital and interdisciplinary art practice from the City College of New York, CUNY, and is currently adjunct teaching at Purchase College in New York State
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals since its establishment in 1925. Among the fellows are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.
