Four faculty members and one alum from California College of the Arts awarded the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship
Faculty members Kim Anno, Lucas Foglia, Guillermo Galindo, and Léonie Guyer, and alum Ahndraya Parlato are among those recognized for the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
San Francisco, CA—April 23, 2024— California College of the Arts (CCA) is thrilled to celebrate four faculty members and one alum who received the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship: Kim Anno (professor, Painting and Drawing), Lucas Foglia (faculty member, MFA Fine Arts), Guillermo Galindo (faculty member, Critical Ethnic Studies), Léonie Guyer (faculty member, MFA Fine Arts), and alum Ahndraya Parlato (MFA, 2005). Former CCA faculty member Rebeca Bollinger is also a recipient of the 2024 fellowship. Each fellow will receive a monetary stipend to pursue independent work.
Chosen through a rigorous application and review process from a pool of 3,000 applicants, 188 Guggenheim Fellows were selected based on career achievement and exceptional promise. A distinguished group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines were selected, and many of their projects directly respond to timely issues. Since its founding in 1925, the Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.
Kim Anno, professor of the Painting and Drawing and Graduate Fine Arts programs, is a painter, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has been collected by museums nationally and shown internationally. “It was a big surprise, I was humbled and overjoyed to be in the great company of artists I recognize,” says Anno.
Guillermo Galindo, faculty member of the Critical Ethnic Studies program, is an experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist, and Jungian Tarotist redefining conventional boundaries of music. “In accepting this award, I am profoundly touched by the acknowledgment of art's power to envision a world characterized by inclusivity. In this era of transformation, art acts as our gateway to envisage a reality where every individual and every viewpoint is honored and embraced,” says Galindo.
Léonie Guyer, faculty member of the Graduate Fine Arts program, is a painter whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including a solo show at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2018. “I am deeply honored and grateful to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship, and to be in the company of artists and scholars I greatly admire,” says Guyer.
“In this era of transformation, art acts as our gateway to envisage a reality where every individual and every viewpoint is honored and embraced.”
(Faculty member, Critical Ethnic Studies)
Lucas Foglia, faculty member of the Graduate Fine Arts program, is a fine arts photographer creating stories about people in nature whose works have been published, exhibited, and collected internationally.
CCA alum Ahndraya Parlato (MFA 2005) is a photographer and professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her most recent book, Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, was published by Mack Books, in 2021. “I am incredibly grateful to both the Guggenheim Foundation and RIT for giving me the dedicated time and resources to work on my project,” says Parlato.
“The Guggenheim Fellowship is by far one of the most prestigious awards an artist can receive,” says Sunny A. Smith, dean of Fine Arts at CCA. “The announcement of this year’s winners is a testament to the high caliber of CCA faculty, one hundred percent of whom remain active and innovative in their fields—as well as to the outstanding achievements of artists we are proud to call alumni.”
About the Guggenheim Foundation
Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom 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. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program.
The Foundation centers the talents and instincts of the Fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate social impact. For example, in 1936, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the Foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe. Photographer Robert Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, was the product of a cross-country tour supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships. The accomplishments of other early Fellows like E.E. Cummings, Jennifer Doudna, Jacob Lawrence, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, and Linus Pauling also demonstrate the strength of the Foundation’s core values and the power and impact of its approach. More information at gf.org.
About California College of the Arts
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) educates students to shape culture and society through the practice and critical study of art, architecture, design, and writing. Benefitting from its San Francisco Bay Area location, the college prepares students for lifelong creative work by cultivating innovation, community engagement, and social and environmental responsibility.
CCA offers a rich curriculum of 22 undergraduate and 10 graduate programs in art, design, architecture, and writing taught by a faculty of expert practitioners. Attracting promising students from across the nation and around the world, CCA is ranked among one of the top 30 most diverse colleges in the U.S. The U.S. News & World Report has ranked CCA as one of the top 10 graduate schools for fine arts in the country.
Graduates are highly sought-after by companies such as Pixar/Disney, Apple, Intel, Meta, Gensler, Google, IDEO, Autodesk, Mattel, and Nike, and many have launched their own successful businesses. Alumni and faculty are often recognized with the highest honors in their fields, including Academy Awards, AIGA Medals, Fulbright Scholarships, Guggenheim Fellowships, MacArthur Fellowships, National Medal of Arts, and the Rome Prize, among others.
CCA is creating a new, expanded college campus in San Francisco spearheaded by the architectural firm Studio Gang. The expansion will add an additional 82,305 square feet of all-new maker spaces, classrooms, studios, galleries, and a continuous indoor-outdoor environment. The campus design will be a model of sustainable construction and practice; will unite the college’s programs in art, crafts, design, architecture, and writing to cultivate collaboration across disciplines; and will provide more student housing than ever before. For more information, visit cca.edu.