The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded one Hunter College faculty and two alumnae a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the nation’s most prestigious honors for scholarly and artistic achievement. Selected from a pool of nearly 2500 applicants, Hunter Professor and Co-Director of the MFA Program Lisa Corinne Davis (MFA ’83), a 2004 Hunter Studio Art MFA recipient Ellie Ga, a filmmaker, and a 2006 Hunter Studio Art MFA Keliy Anderson-Staley, a photographer, were among the 180 artists, writers, scholars and scientists awarded Fellowships.
Lisa Corinne Davis is an abstract painter whose work exploring racial, social and psychological identity has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. She is best known for her abstract paintings and works on paper that resemble multilayered maps she describes as “inventive geography” to explore perceptions of racial, social and psychological identity. Davis’ paintings have been exhibited in galleries across the United States and Europe and have been included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Her Guggenheim will be supporting two upcoming solo shows, at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco this fall and the Miles McEnery Gallery next spring.
A Baltimore native, Davis earned her MFA at Hunter in 1983 and joined its faculty in 2002. She previously taught at the Yale University School of Art and has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numerous universities. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, three artist fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
“I am proud to say that Hunter College now has six Guggenheim awardees on our Studio Arts faculty,” said Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab. “That number alone in one department is proof of Hunter’s commitment to the arts and humanities.”
The Guggenheim fellows on the Studio Arts faculty are: A.K. Burns, Carrie Moyer, Chitra Ganesh, Juan Sanchez, Nari Ward and now Lisa Corinne Davis. There are also several other past Guggenheim fellowship winners in other Hunter departments including: Victoria Johnson, a professor in Hunter’s Department of Urban Policy and Planning and Suzanne Farrin, the Frayda B. Lindemann Professor of Music and chair of the Department of Music and Nancy Foner, Professor of Sociology.
Ellie Ga is a New York-born, Stockholm-based artist whose immersive, wide-ranging investigations include the classification of stains on city sidewalks to the charting of the quotidian in the frozen reaches of the Arctic Ocean. In performances and video installations, Ga’s braided narratives intertwine extensive research with first-hand experiences that often follow uncertain leads and take unexpected turns. She has exhibited and performed internationally at the New Museum, The Kitchen and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and at M-Museum, Leuven; Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, among many others.
Keliy Anderson-Staley, is the Director of Graduate Studies & Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Houston School of Art. Keliy Anderson-Staley’s work has been exhibited at the Akron Art Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the UCR/California Museum of Photography, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Morris Museum of Art, Society for Photographic Education in Cleveland, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and the University of Maine Museum of Art.
The Guggenheim Fellowships were established in 1925 by the late philanthropist and United States Senator Simon Guggenheim and Olga Guggenheim to support exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The 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.
