Four NYU professors are recipients of this year’s Guggenheim Fellowship, earning grants to further their projects in the creative arts, sciences and humanities. They were each selected alongside 194 other scholars across 53 fields and 83 North American universities for the prestigious program’s 100th class.
Tisch professors Jessica Bardsley and Rubén Polendo were honored for their work in film and performance, respectively, while CAS professors Katie Kitamura and Nicole Eustace were selected under the fiction and American history categories. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation allocated varying amounts of funding to each recipient, reflective of their other resources and scope of their projects.
In an interview with WSN, Eustace said she plans to use the money to advance progress on her short book titled “Unsettling Question,” which examines British colonialism. She explained that her book is in tandem with the publisher W. W. Norton and Company’s initiative to feature works of “bold thinking and fresh perspectives” in under 200 pages.
“I am the child of immigrants, and I was really interested in trying to understand America,” Eustace said. “I was trying to make sense of this country and wanted to start at the beginning. Certainly the contemporary moment is interesting, but I wanted to kind of find out how it all started.”
Besides teaching history at NYU, Eustace is the director of the university’s Atlantic History Workshop — which holds regular sessions for attendees to share and discuss analytical papers on historical topics from across the world. Eustace also won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Bardsley, an experimental filmmaker, said she plans to allocate the Guggenheim Fellowship funding toward her next film, “A Cave Without a Name.” She described that the feature documentary is about forms of resistance and their relationship with the nighttime. Her other films, including “Life Without Dreams” and “The Blazing World,” explore themes of insomnia and depression.
“If you can’t dream, you can’t imagine other world possibilities,” Bardsley told WSN. “My film is about the kind of experience of being alienated from nights — being depressed.”
A clinical professor at NYU’s Creative Writing program, Kitamaru received the fellowship just one week after publishing her suspense novel “Audition,” which follows the stories of both an accomplished actress and a younger man throughout their relationship. Kitamaru has written numerous other critically-acclaimed novels such as “Intimacies” and “A Separation,” and has had her work published in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian and more.
Polendo serves as an associate dean of Tisch’s Institute of the Performing Arts and in 1997, founded Theater Mitu — an interdisciplinary theater company based in Brooklyn that has been recognized by organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council for the Arts. At NYU Abu Dhabi, Polendo also founded and directed the theater program and continues to work as an affiliated faculty member at the campus.
Bardsley emphasized the importance of the Guggenheim Fellowship for recognizing impressive artistic and scholarly work, especially in a context where economic production is often prioritized over artistry.
“We don’t live in a country that has tons of support for the arts, especially right now,” Bardsley said. “I think it’s really amazing that there are foundations that award artists fellowships like this, because it recognizes how long and hard we work and also appreciates the quality of the work that we do.”
Contact Yanik Jhaveri at [email protected].