Five Oberlin Alumni Earn 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships

On April 15, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows. Of the 198 recipients, five are Oberlin alumni: Josh Faught '01, David Getsy '95, Elizabeth Otto '94, Huang Ruo '00, and Bijal Pravin Trivedi '92.

"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," Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation, said in a press release. "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."

The Guggenheim Fellowship is a prestigious annual award that recognizes superior achievements in arts, music, writing, and the sciences. Each Fellow will receive a monetary stipend, which the foundation notes "allowing them to pursue independent work at the highest level under 'the freest possible conditions.'"

Oberlin alumni and faculty are perennial recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships. Winners in recent years span multiple disciplines, including music composition (Nkeiru Okoye '92, Phyllis Chen '97, Peter Evans '03, Katherine Young '03); geography and environmental studies (Elena Bennett '94); drama and performance (César Alvarez '03); general nonfiction (Sonia Shah '90); fine arts (Robert Lobe '67); choreography (Juliana F. May '02); European & Latin American History (Max Paul Friedman '89); and South & Southeast Asian Studies (Jonathan Silk '83).

Faculty who have received Guggenheim Fellowships include Eva & John Young-Hunter Professor of Integrated Media Julia Christensen and Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright.

Oberlin's 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship winners include:

Josh Faught '01 (Fine Arts). Josh explores the use of pop cultural detritus, archival materials, and the vernacular of textiles to address the relationships between language, community, and the constructions of identity. Recent solo exhibitions include Josh Faught, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2025); Look Across the Water into the Darkness, Look for the Fog, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2022); and Both Things are True, Koppe Astner Gallery, Glasgow (2019). Josh has also exhibited in group exhibitions in multiple places, including the Dallas Contemporary, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; ICA Boston; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.

David Getsy '95 (Fine Arts Research). David is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is 2022's Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art, which received the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publication on the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. He previously authored Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, which is back in print as of 2023, while his edited books include the 2016 anthology of artists' writings Queer. David and his co-author Che Gossett received the College Art Association's Award for Distinction for their 2021 article "A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History."

Elizabeth (Libby) Otto '94 (Fine Arts Research). Libby is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Buffalo and previously served as Executive Director of UB's Humanities Institute (HI). Her research focuses on early 20th-century visual and media culture. She is the author of numerous scholarly essays and the co-author of 2019's Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective and of the 2019 exhibition catalog Bauhausmädels/Bauhaus Gals. She has also coedited four books, including 2019's Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School and 2019's Art and Resistance in Germany.

Huang Ruo '00 (Music Composition). Composer Huang Ruo's 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. His music has been premiered and performed by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and BBC Symphony Orchestra, to name a few. His recent new opera M. Butterfly (with libretto by David Henry Hwang) received its world premiere with the Santa Fe Opera in 2022, while future opera commissions will be for the Met Opera and the San Francisco Opera.

Bijal Pravin Trivedi '92 (Science Writing). Bijal is an award-winning journalist specializing in longform narrative features about biology, medicine, and health. She is the former senior science editor for National Geographic. Her first book, Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever, was published in 2020. She is now working on her next book that focuses on sickle cell disease.