John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Awarded Fellowships to faculty members Monica Youn, John Heginbotham, and recent Hodder Fellow Nora Chipaumire
Three artists associated with the Lewis Center for the Art at Princeton University were recently awarded 2018 Guggenheim Fellowships. Poet, Princeton alumnus, and Lecturer in Creative Writing Monica Youn; dance artist and frequent Lecturer in Dance John Heginbotham; and choreographer and 2014-2015 Hodder Fellow Nora Chipaumire were among 173 Fellows named on April 4 by the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s 94th competition.
Guggenheim Fellows are known for their diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and achievements. This year’s class of Fellows ranges in age from 29 to 80, come from 31 states and 69 different academic institutions, and represent 49 different scholarly and artistic fields.
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has awarded more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Awards, and other internationally recognized honors.
Monica Youn. Photo courtesy of Monica Youn
Monica Youn is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Blackacre was named one of the best poetry collections of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post and BuzzFeed. Her second book Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have been widely published in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. The daughter of Korean immigrants and a former lawyer, she was raised in Houston, Texas, is a member of Princeton’s Class of 1993, and now lives in New York City. She is a member of the curatorial collective The Racial Imaginary Institute and chairs the Lewis Center Committee on Race and the Arts.
John Heginbotham. Photo by Bud Lammers
Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, John Heginbotham is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. He graduated from The Juilliard School in 1993 with a B.F.A. in Dance and was awarded the Martha Hill Prize for Sustained Achievement in Dance. He subsequently performed in the work of Pam Tanowitz, John Jasperse, Rebecca Stenn, Vanessa Walters, and Pilobolus Dance Theater, among others. From 1995–1998, he was a member of Susan Marshall & Company, originating roles in her evening-length works The Most Dangerous Room in the House and the award-winning dance opera composed by Philip Glass, Les Enfants Terribles. Heginbotham is the recipient of the 2014 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and two Jerome Robbins Foundation New Essential Works (NEW) Fellowships (2010 and 2012). In addition to teaching at Princeton University, he is the Director of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble at Dartmouth College and is a founding teacher of Dance for PD®, an ongoing collaboration between the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinson Group.
Nora Chipaumire. Photo by Antoine Tempe
Nora Chipaumire is a Zimbabwe-born choreographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has earned her several awards including a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 U.S.A. Ford Fellowship, and the 2009 AFROPOP Real Life Award for her choreography in the film, Nora. She is a three-time New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awardee, in 2014 for Dark Swan; in 2008 for her dance-theater work, Chimurenga; and in 2007 for her body of work with Urban Bush Women, where she was a featured performer (2003-2008) and associate artistic director (2007-2008). She has studied dance in many parts of the world — including Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and South Africa), Cuba, Jamaica, and the U.S. — and has led significant contemporary dance and choreographic workshops in east, central, and West Africa. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe’s School of Law, Chipaumire holds an M.A. in Dance and M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Mills College. As a recent Hodder Fellow at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Chipaumire presented her works-in-progress as part of the Choreographers-in-Residence in Conversation Series and completed the second installment in her Diptych: “portrait of myself as my father,” a work that investigates the self, blackness, Africa-ness, as well deepening the minimalist African aesthetic which she champions.
In addition to these three Lewis Center for the Arts affiliated artists, 2018 Guggenheim Fellowships were awarded to three other Princeton faculty members: Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities Brooke Holmes, Department of History Professor Ekaterina Pravilova, and Chair of the East Asian studies department Martin Kern.
The Guggenheim Fellowship program is a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation is supported through donations from its trustees, former Fellows, friends, and other foundations.
For more information about the Lewis Center for the Arts and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.
