Five CUNY Faculty Members Win 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships

• Four Alumni Also Recognized with Prestigious Honor
• Artist, Author, Anthropologist, Film Director and Musician Among Winners

NEW YORK (TIP): Five CUNY faculty members have won this year’s prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships in recognition of their impactful and pioneering contributions to the arts and humanities. In addition, four CUNY alumni were also recognized.

The CUNY faculty fellows are: ·

• Daniel Bozhkov, a multimedia artist and art professor at Hunter College

• Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College

• Karen Strassler, an anthropologist at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

• Antonio Tibaldi, a film professor at City College

• John Yao, a music professor at Queens College

“We congratulate our CUNY community members for securing this coveted Guggenheim fellowship, a recognition of their extraordinary and impactful work,” said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “They are visionaries who are leading the way in their fields of study at CUNY and beyond.”

In addition to the faculty members, this year’s winners include four CUNY alumni:

Marie-Helene Bertino, a novelist and lecturer, Yale University (Brooklyn College ’08)

 

Ira Eduardovna, video installation  artist and filmmaker (Hunter College ’12)

Martha Suzanne Jones,  historian, legal scholar and professor, Johns Hopkins University (Hunter College ’83 and CUNY School of Law ’87)

Selena Roy Kimball,

visual artist and professor, Parsons School of Design (Hunter College ’07)

Now in its 100th Class, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this year selected 198 fellows in 53 disciplines from nearly 3,500 applicants. Each fellow receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” See the full list of 2025 Fellows.

“At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers,  and artists,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”

Each of the five faculty winners are recognized as leaders and innovators in their respective fields, contributing to the University’s academic and artistic community:

Daniel Bozhkov is a Bulgarian-born artist who works in multimedia, including performance and video. He is a professor in Hunter College’s Department of Art and Art History. Throughout his career, his work has been presented at MoMA P.S.1, Queens Museum, Santa Monica Museum   of Art, and in international exhibitions such as the 33rd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, 6th Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom and the 1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Harold Holzer is a prolific writer and editor, having authored, co-authored or edited more  than 50 books in his career. As one of the nation’s leading academics on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, he previously   served as co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is currently the chairman of the Lincoln Forum. In 2015, he joined Hunter College as the Roosevelt House director. His most recent book is “Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.”

Karen Strassler is a cultural anthropologist at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work focuses on photographs, visual and media culture and the role images play in affecting social and political outcomes. Her 2020 book, “Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia,” examines how the public images shaped the political field during a tumultuous time of democratic  transition and technological transformation.

Antonio Tibaldi  is a film writer and director of fiction and non-fiction content who has worked in the film industries of Europe, Australia and North America since 1992. He has received various recognitions, including six Australian Film Institute Award nominations, one Catalonia  Gaudí award and a Spirit Award from the Brooklyn Film Festival. His work has also been presented at various festivals like Berlin, Sundance and Tribeca.

John Yao  is an accomplished trombonist, composer and arranger. His musical skills and experience have established him as a unique and forward-thinking jazz talent. He has worked with esteemed solo artists and groups like Paquito D’Rivera, Danilo Perez, Kurt Elling,  Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Orchestra of  Philadelphia and the Arsonore Spirit Orchestra, among many others. Outside of his role as a professor at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music, he is also a professor at Berklee School of Music and Molloy University.

The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving more than 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 50,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “genius” grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background. To learn more about CUNY, visit https://www.cuny.edu.