Seven artists and scholars with ties to the American Academy in Rome have been named 2025 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows—an enduring sign of the Academy’s creative reach and influence.
Guggenheim Fellowships, awarded annually since 1925, support exceptional individuals in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The overlap with AAR is no coincidence: both institutions champion deep, independent work across disciplines, and many Rome Prize Fellows and Residents have also become Guggenheim Fellows.
Kamrooz Aram (2024 Fellow), a visual artist, explores the politics of ornament and museum display, bringing together abstraction and Middle Eastern aesthetics in ways that challenge modernist hierarchies.
Composer Katherine Balch (2021 Fellow) creates vivid, sensory music inspired by art, literature, and the natural world—her Rome year offered fertile ground for sonic experimentation.
Conceptual artist Daniel Bozhkov (2008 Fellow) is known for his inventive, often humorous projects that blur history, labor, and myth.
Theaster Gates (2020 Resident), an artist known for his socially engaged work in sculpture, architecture, and urban space, draws on Black material culture and histories of place.
Historian Katherine Jansen (1994 Fellow, 2014 Resident) studies medieval religious life, gender, and pilgrimage, with Rome’s layered past informing her research. On May 6, Jansen will lecture on “The Jubilee, the Veil of Veronica, and Religious Devotion in Premodern Rome” in Rome.
Katie Kitamura (2024 Fellow) crafts psychologically rich novels shaped by questions of identity, estrangement, and voice. On April 23, Kitamura joins Ayad Akhtar (2018 Resident) and Valeria Luiselli for a conversation at the 2025 Janet and Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony in New York.
Ester Partegàs (2023 Fellow), a sculptor and installation artist, transforms overlooked materials into objects of critique and contemplation, engaging the textures of contemporary life.