2025 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to New School Faculty Members
The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the country’s most important and competitive programs for artists, intellectuals, scholars, scientists, and more. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 Fellows.
This year’s cohort, which recognizes the Foundation’s 100th anniversary, includes 198 individuals, with six faculty members from throughout The New School among the prestigious Fellows.
Huang Ruo, a faculty member in the Mannes School of Music, Caroline Davis, a faculty member in the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, Selena Roy Kimball, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art Practice in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, Ester Partegàs, a Fine Arts faculty member at Parsons, Talia Lugacy, Assistant Professor of Screen Studies at Eugene Lang, and Andrew Seth Meier, Associate Professor of Writing at Lang, will all receive a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions,” according to the Foundation.
“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,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “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.”
Composer Huang Ruo has been lauded by The New York Times for having “a distinctive style.” His vibrant and inventive musical voice draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz to create a seamless, organic integration using a compositional technique he calls “Dimensionalism.” Ruo’s diverse compositional works span from orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, to cross-genre, sound installation, architectural installation, multimedia, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film. His music has been premiered and performed by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, National Polish Radio Orchestra, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, Asko/Schoenberg, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, and conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Marin Alsop, Michael Tilson Thomas, and James Conlon.
Mobile since her birth in Singapore, composer, saxophonist, and vocalist Caroline Davis’s expression covers a wide range of styles, owed to her shifting environment as a child. From angular, melody-present instrumental outfits to soulful, quirky song writing, her persona is recognizably present. As an improviser and saxophonist, she has released six albums under her name and has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star. Through the years, her work continues to garner praise in domestic and international publications. Davis has shared musical moments with Lee Konitz, Angelica Sanchez, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, Thana Alexa, and Billy Kaye, among many others. She regularly sings and writes songs with the experimental R&B band, My Tree. Her composition work has led her to be a resident fellow at MacDowell, The Jazz Gallery, and ICE Ensemble Evolution; and she was awarded Jerome Hill, CMA, and NYFA fellowships. Her compositions integrate science and music, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition. Davis is an advocate for gender equity (This Is A Movement, The New School) and abolition (Justice for Keith Lamar).
Selena Kimball is a visual artist whose work—large-scale photomontage, installation, and book projects—examines visual perceptions of history by reimagining the photographic collections (archives, printed books, newspapers) that document these events. Her long-term collaborations include films and experimental research with visual anthropologist Alyssa Grossman. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including the Katonah Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She is a recent recipient of the Pollock-Krasner award, a Jerome Foundation grant, and two MacDowell fellowships. A native of Maine, she lives and works in New York City where she is co-founder and co-director, with Pascal Glissmann, of the Observational Practices Lab at Parsons.
Born in La Garriga, Barcelona, in 1972, Ester Partegàs is a visual artist and educator who lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas. Her work originates in a fascination with urban space and its most unassuming commodities. Generic items, such as plastic crates, shopping bags, tarpaulins, receipts and bar-coded labels speak about a shared social, economic and affective reality that is as mundane and invisible, as it is powerful in determining behaviors and habits. She addresses conflicts that play out in the material world presenting the potential wonder of the most immediate, with the belief that there is a reciprocal process by which things make us as much as we make things. Partegàs’ work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues such as the Sculpture Center, LIC, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Arnolfini Bristol; the Moscow, Athens and Busan Biennials; among others.
Talia Lugacy is a narrative independent director, writer and actor. Her current feature film THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY was released by Warner Media HBO and won the Audience Award at San Francisco Indie Fest, Woods Hole FF, Indie Street, and won Best Narrative Feature at Atlanta Underground, as well as the NYWIFT award for Best Female Director at its NYC premiere, the Urbanworld Film Festival. The film is a hybrid narrative about combat trauma and is a collaboration with veterans of the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam wars. Her previous feature Descent premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival prior to a theatrical release, starred Rosario Dawson and was a New York Times Critics Pick.
Andrew Meier is the author of two previous award-winning works of nonfiction: “Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall,” and “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service.” A former Moscow correspondent for Time, Meier has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, among numerous other national and international publications, for more than two decades. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two daughters.