Rebecca Lazier, Professor of the Practice and Acting Director of the Program in Dance, has received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Choreography. Current Hodder Fellow and performance artist Modesto “Flako” Jimenez, 2018-19 Hodder Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok, and 2017-18 Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence Abby Zbikowski are also recipients this year.
Chosen from a diverse pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, these four Lewis Center artists are among 188 scholars and “culture-creators” working across 52 disciplines to be named Fellows this year. They join the ranks of 19,000 Fellows honored since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in the press statement. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
About the Faculty Recipient: Rebecca Lazier
Professor of the Practice, Dance, Rebecca Lazier. Photo by Jon Sweeney
“It is such an honor to receive this recognition and support and to be standing alongside the artists in the lineage of this fellowship,” Lazier remarked upon receiving the Fellowship. “The process of being choreographer is a bit like being hit by waves: some leave you gasping for air wondering if you ever want to stand in the ocean again and others make your feet sink down, down, down into the sand while the waves push and pull. Persistence comes from standing for a long, long time.”
Lazier is a choreographer and educator based in New York City and Nova Scotia. Recognized as an audacious experimenter, Lazier creates dances of explosive physical vitality inspired by the thinking and problem-solving that is possible through collaboration. She continually reaches outside of dance—towards experimental music, engineering, architecture, visual art, and anatomy—to ask how the questions and methodologies that drive invention in other fields can open up new frontiers of choreographic knowledge. Recent collaborators include scientist Naomi Leonard, composers Daniel Trueman and Paul Lansky; new music ensembles Newspeak, Mobius and SŌ Percussion; visual artist Janet Echelman; and dance artists Raja Feather Kelly, Cori Kresge, Jennifer Lafferty, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener.
Lazier has choreographed more than eighty works presented in six countries, including recent performances at The La MaMa Moves! Festival, Invisible Dog Art Center, New York Live Arts; Canada’s Scotia Festival of Music and Live Art Dance; and Poland’s prestigious Malta Festival. She is the recipient of a Bessie Schönberg Choreography Residency at The Yard; an honorary fellowship to Djerassi; Artist-in-Residence awards from The Joyce Theater Foundation and Movement Research; and major funding from New Music USA, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Harkness Foundation for Dance.
Photo: Marie-Andrée Lemire
Lazier’s performance project There Might Be Others won a 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award before touring internationally, and her project Everywhere the Edges was supported by The National Creation Fund and The Canada Council for the Arts. Lazier’s most recent work, for which she has received wide recognition, is NODES—Net tOpologies and Dance Explorations, an ongoing project at the intersection of engineering, dance, sculpture, geometry, topology, rigging, performance, and circus. The project received support through Princeton’s Office of the Dean of Research at Princeton for Collaborations between Artists and Engineers among other funders. The project was also the subject of a Princeton Atelier course, co-taught by Lazier, Princeton Professor of Engineering Sigrid Adriaenssens, and visual artist Janet Echelman, “The Understor(e)y: Suspension, Movement, Space” offered in spring 2020 and involved students in the early development of the project.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will directly impact Lazier’s current project Noli Timere (Latin for ‘be not afraid’)—the culmination of her 5-year collaboration with Echelman—which showcases a choreography and a sculpture that are continually transformed by one another. This soaring aerial performance features a custom designed voluminous net sculpture and 8 multidisciplinary performers. The work is a fusion of contemporary dance and avant-garde circus; art installation and advanced engineering; public sculpture and social practice exploring how people navigate an unstable world. Later this spring, Lazier will be in residence at the Center for Contemporary Performance PS21 in Chatham, New York, and will present a special preview of Noli Timere on June 22.
Video: The Understor(e)y: Suspension, Movement, Space
In the spring of 2020, The Understor(e)y: Suspension, Movement, Space was a hands-on Princeton Atelier course combining dance, design, engineering, sound, and interactive sculpture until COVID forced a campus-wide evacuation.
About the Fellow Recipients
Modesto Jimenez. Photo by Crichton Atkinson
A 2023-24 Hodder Fellow in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised, multi-hyphenate artist. As a poet, playwright, educator, actor, producer, and director, his work exists in and explores the intersections of identity, language, mediums, cultures, and communities found in his personal life and beyond. Flako’s recent work includes Taxilandia, a multifaceted Bushwick community tour and poetic experience from the back of a taxi cab that earned the NY Times Critics’ Pick and rave reviews from Time Out New York. Flako is the founder of ¡Oye! Group, a nonprofit that serves as an incubator for artists both native and immigrant to New York City. In 2021, Flako received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship and Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in performing arts and theater. Currently, Flako is working on Mercedes, a multi-disciplinary art experience exploring the relationships between matriarchy and ancestors, familial bonds and inherited trauma, and how our own identity can impact our mental health.
Martyna Majok. Photo by Brian McConkey
Martyna Majok was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play, Cost of Living. Her plays have been presented at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, WP Theatre, and Ensemble Studio Theatre, among others. Her other honors include The Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award, The Lilly Award’s Stacey Mindich Prize, Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Original New Play at The Helen Hayes Awards, The Ashland New Plays Festival Women’s Invitational Prize, The Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award, David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize, New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, Global Age Project Prize, and the NNPN/Smith Prize for Political Playwriting. Majok’s commissions include Lincoln Center, The Bush Theatre in London, Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, South Coast Rep, and Manhattan Theatre Club. She earned her BA from University of Chicago and MFA from the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard. Following her time as a 2018-19 Hodder Fellow, Majok returned to Princeton this past November for a public conversation about adapting modern literature classics for the stage.
Abby Zbikowski. Photo by Effy Falck
A Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence named in 2017-18, Abby Zbikowski is a choreographer, Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and faculty member at the American Dance Festival. In 2018 she choreographed a new work performed by Princeton students in the annual Princeton Dance Festival. Her choreographic work with her company, Abby Z and the New Utility, has been presented by the Gibney Dance Center, Movement Research at Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, and elsewhere. Zbikowski has been an Artist-in-Residence as part of the nEW Festival in Philadelphia, the American Dance Festival, and the Bates Dance Festival. She has studied intensively at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal, holds a B.F.A. in dance from Temple University, and an M.F.A. in dance from Ohio State University, where she worked closely with mentors Bebe Miller and Vickie Blaine. As a performer, Zbikowski has worked with Charles O. Anderson/Dance Theater X, Vincent Mantsoe, and the Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project. She has been on faculty at the Ohio State University and has taught technique and creative process abroad at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia as part of Global Practice Sharing, sponsored by Movement Research.
Learn more
Read the Princeton University news story to learn more about six other Princeton faculty members who are recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships this year, as well as several Princeton alumni.
