Brandeis Professor Sheida Soleimani named 2026 Guggenheim Fellow

Brandeis Stories

Brandeis Professor Sheida Soleimani named 2026 Guggenheim Fellow

By Steve Foskett
May 28, 2026 • General

Sheida Soleimani, associate professor of fine arts, has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.

An Iranian-American artist and photographer, she was one of 223 individuals working across 55 disciplines to receive the prestigious fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process, fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants.

Each fellow receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under "the freest possible conditions," according to the foundation.

Soleimani, who makes work that melds sculpture, collage and photography, recently talked about how the fellowship will allow her to dedicate more resources to her work and to further explore one of her more recent passions: wildlife rehabilitation.

What does it mean to you to be named a Guggenheim Fellow?

Being named a Guggenheim Fellow feels both surreal and deeply meaningful to me, especially as someone whose work moves between disciplines and worlds. So much of what I make comes out of long-term emotional and physical labor - building photographs, caring for injured wild birds through my wildlife rehabilitation work, researching archives, collaborating with my family, and thinking through histories of migration, violence, survival, and care. To have that kind of practice recognized in this way feels incredibly affirming. It also feels meaningful to be acknowledged not just for a single project, but for the larger world I've been building over many years.

How do you plan to use your fellowship award in your field?

The fellowship will give me the ability to dedicate more time and resources toward several ongoing projects, including new bodies of photographic and sculptural work, writing, and the continued development of my wildlife rehabilitation organization, Congress of the Birds. A lot of my work requires extensive research, fabrication, travel, and collaboration, and having support like this creates room to think more expansively and sustainably. It's rare to have time to fully immerse yourself in experimental processes without constantly thinking about survival or logistics, and I'm very grateful for that opportunity.

Your award category was photography, but what you do is more complex. Can you explain your approach to your craft?

While photography is the foundation of my practice, I think of the work as existing somewhere between image-making, installation, sculpture, and storytelling. I build constructed photographic tableaux using archival materials, family photographs, props, live sets, sculpture, and hand-built environments. More recently, my work has also become deeply informed by my experience as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Caring for injured migratory birds has changed the way I think about bodies, trauma, displacement, fragility, and survival, and those ideas increasingly shape both the conceptual and physical structure of the work. I'm interested in photography not as a static document, but as something spatial, performative, and emotionally charged - something capable of holding contradiction, humor, grief, and political complexity all at once.