Associate Professor of Fine Arts Sónia Almeida is awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
April 30, 2024
Associate Professor of Fine Arts Sónia Almeida
Associate Professor of Fine Arts Sónia Almeida was among 188 luminaries from a variety of fields to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2024.
Almeida, who was born in Portugal, has taught at Brandeis since 2014. She is interested in how language relates to questions of agency and power, and her work is an investigation into the ways that language is learned, shared and adapted in processes of fragmentation and multiplicity. Her artworks explore disparate yet connected visual languages brought together within a single work. She teaches courses in printmaking, artists’ books and fabric arts.
In being chosen as a Guggenheim Fellow, Almeida is part of a distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
In all, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community. Since its founding in 1925, the Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.
“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. “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.”