Yale School of Art Alums & Former Faculty Named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows

The Yale School of Art is pleased to announce that alumni William Cordova (MFA ‘04), Eve Fowler (MFA '92), Victoria L. Sambunaris (MFA ‘99), and former faculty member Josephine Halvorson are among the 2021 Guggenheim Fellows named today by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

This year’s fellowships were awarded to 184 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists meticulously selected from nearly 3,000 applicants across the United States and Canada in the Foundation’s ninety-seventh competition. Chosen through a rigorous peer-review process on the basis of both prior achievement and exceptional promise, the 2021 Fellows are drawn from 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 academic institutions, 28 states and 2 Canadian provinces. The 2021 Guggenheim Fellows range in age from 31 to 85, and almost 60 have no full-time college or university affiliation.

Based in North Miami Beach, Florida, newly announced fellow William Cordova maintains a conceptually rich practice engaging the “ephemeral visuality of transition and displacement,” and graduated from the School of Art’s MFA program in 2004. It was over a decade earlier, in 1992, when Los Angeles-based artist Eve Fowler graduated from the program. Also a newly-announced fellow, Fowler employs her background in photography to create work that “coalesces art and language.” In 1999, Victoria L. Sambunaris earned her MFA from the School of Art’s Photography program. Employing a nomadic approach in the development of her deeply nuanced relationship with the American landscape, each year, Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey, equipped with a 5x7 inch field camera, film, a video camera and research material.

2021 Guggenheim Fellow Josephine Halvorson is an alumnae of the School of Art’s summer program, Yale Norfolk, and previously served as a faculty member in the Painting/Printmaking department as an appointed critic in 2010 and 2012. Halvorson is now based in New Marlborough, Massachusetts, where she is Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting and a Professor of Art at Boston University.

Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.