Moving image art shines among Guggenheim Fellowship recipients

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced this year's recipients of the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship. Encompassing a total of 223 recipients spanning 55 various disciplines from all corners of the globe, the Guggenheim Fellowship provides a cross-section of artists, scholars and scientists selected not only for their past achievements, but also for their potential to push the envelope of their respective fields. Practitioners of film art and video art are prominent among the recipients of this year's Guggenheim Fellowships.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Tenzin Phuntsog, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Christopher Harris and Jacqueline Goss are some of the significant names in moving image art who have been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2026. Aside from the prestige that it bestows on the recipient, the fellowship comes with a sizable monetary award: the precise amount is never disclosed by the Foundation, but ranges from $30,000 to $45,000.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich leverages the creative and narrative potential of the movie camera and film as a medium to consider the interiority and desires of Black women, and the formative impact that desires, both articulated and unarticulated, have in shaping our lives. Her films The Ballade of Suzanne Césaire (2024) and Conspiracy (co-directed by Simone Leigh, 2022) have received high praise from critics, with the latter being screened at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. She was among the recipients of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award, the 2022 Creative Capitol Award, and also received special jury prizes at the New Orleans Film Festival and Blackstar Film Festival.

Christopher Harris manipulates celluloid, employs optical printing and altered film stock, and hand-cranks the motion picture camera, disrupting the images – and meaning – of the representation of Black people. His films have appeared at numerous festivals, museums and cinematheques including solo screenings at the 2024 Whitney Biennial in New York, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, Locarno Film Festival, Arsenal Berlin, and a complete retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Harris’ honors include a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, a 2020-2021 fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2015 Creative Capital award, among others.

Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose films address the impact that scientific systems have on our self-perception. She utilizes a diverse array of tools and methods to explore and comprehend the ways that a scientist's vanity, fear, sense of loneliness, and desire seep into their scientific experimentation, language, mapping and political systems. She has received awards for her work, most notably the 2007 Herb Alpert Award, the Logue Award at the Images Festival in Toronto, and for best feature-length film at the Migrating Forms Festival in New York.

Tenzin Phuntsog is a Tibetan-American artist and filmmaker whose practice spans moving image, narrative film, and installation. His body of work is informed by his own experience of living in exile, and is structured around visual histories and spiritual practices grounded in Tibetan Buddhism. Primarily working in 35mm film, Phuntsog lenses his own projects and, in keeping with the Buddhist tenet of this world's transience, embraces the impermanence that this medium lends to them. For Phuntsog, the ability of technology to transform our perception, to mediate between the mundane and the transcendent and distance and time is a point of interest that he underscores throughout his works. He was also a Flaherty Fellow, Haus of Media Art Grant Recipient, and NARS New York Artist in Residence.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist and filmmaker based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, whose approach to film is reminiscent of ethnographic studies and theater plays. She addresses the history of her native Puerto Rico in her works, alongside references to Haitian poetics and feminist speculative fiction, and the issue of post-military land. Her employment of non-actors lends her works an air of authenticity, aimed at creating a documentary environment in which they can reenact events from their own popular culture, history and Indigenous mythology. She received the 2019 Herb Alpert Award, the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the 2015 Creative Capital Visual Arts Award for her films.

With these and other artists in the Film and Video category receiving a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and many artists from this field featuring prominently in major museum exhibitions, auctions and closely-watched lists such as ArtReview's Power 100, moving image art is on the rise. More information about the Guggenheim Fellowship can be found here.