Guggenheim Announces 2009 Fellowship Awards for the United States and Canada

April 8, 2009 — Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today that in its eighty-fifth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. One of the hallmarks of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is the diversity of its Fellows. The ages of this year's Fellows range from twenty-nine to seventy; their residences span the world, from Waipahu, Hawaii, to New York City and from Toronto to Glasgow; and their Fellowship projects will carry them to every continent. For example, Deborah Lawrence will be studying the sustainability of shifting cultivation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, while Janet M. Conrad will be working on a new detector for large liquid argon experiments at MIT and Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois; Saskia Hamilton will be in the Netherlands, completing poems for her new collection; composer Erin Gee will work in Graz, Austria; and Kathryn Linn Geurts will be in Ghana, studying the ethnography of disability in urban Africa. Chris Abani's research for his novel requires him to travel from his home in Los Angeles to South Africa and the islands of South Georgia; and Julia Loktev will be in the country of Georgia working on her fiction feature film. L. Scott Mills will be applying his ecological knowledge to the conservation of biodiversity in the Kingdom of Bhutan, while Yasuko Yokoshi will be working on her latest choreographic piece in New York, Tokyo, Tallahassee, and Alberta, Canada.

In all, sixty-two disciplines and sixty-eight different academic institutions are represented by this year's Fellows. Fifty-six Fellows are unaffiliated or hold only adjunct or part-time positions at universities. Supplemental support for these unaffiliated Fellows is provided by the Leon Levy Foundation.