The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2025 Fellowship, marking 100 years of the fellowship’s legacy. Among the 198 honorees are 30 MacDowell Fellows—an impressive number that highlights the caliber of artists who come to MacDowell’s historic campus in New Hampshire to create. Spanning literature, visual arts, performance, film, and music, these distinguished individuals are making significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape.
Among this year’s standout recipients is composer Xinyang Wang (24), whose bold and evocative work bridges myth, memory, and cultural tradition. His application for the Guggenheim Fellowship was supported by three compositions: 化龙 Gan-Jiang, Mo-Ye (2018): A symphonic poem based on the Chinese legend of the swordsmith Gan-Jiang and his wife Mo-Ye, which explores themes of love, sacrifice, and transcendence; 冰雪临城 Boréas (2019): An orchestral fantasy that merges Greek mythology—with classical Chinese poetry, evoking winter’s duality of harshness and hope. Premiered by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in 2021; and 清梦压星河 Plodding into a Starlit Dream (2024): A sextet for harp, piano, percussion, flute, violin, and cello, commissioned and premiered by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival—marking its first commission from a Chinese composer.
Wang describes being named one of this year’s 198 fellows as "deeply honoring." He adds, “It reaffirms my commitment to rigorous creativity—a commitment strengthened by the extraordinary peers I encountered at MacDowell.”
Another honoree is Rajee Samarasinghe (23), a filmmaker born and raised amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka, who has garnered attention for his proposed new feature film, The Moment—an experimental hybrid documentary to be shot in China. Reflecting on the impact of the fellowship, Samarasinghe shared, “This support gives me the freedom to keep creating and to take risks—something I don’t take for granted… I’m very humbled to share this recognition with such a brilliant and diverse group of artists, scholars, and thinkers.”
Samarasinghe will move forward with The Moment as his primary focus—“a very personal project about self-conception, family, cultural memory, collective trauma, and the weight of unfinished stories.” He continues to emerge as a trailblazing voice in independent film, consistently pushing boundaries with deeply personal and visually striking work.
The following 30 MacDowell Fellows have been named among the 2025 Guggenheim class for prior career achievement and exceptional promise: Teresa Baker (15), Marie-Helene Bertino (14), Katarina Burin (09), Donald Byrd (09), Cynthia Cruz (99, 00, 03, 05), Leslie Cuyjet (20, 21), Caroline Davis (19), Carl Elsaesser (24), Sheri Fink (11, 13, 22), francine j. harris (17), Sheila Heti (17), Hong Hong (20), Tania Rachel James (16), Lars Jan (10), Jilaine Jones (14), Selena Kimball (11, 17, 18), Nicole Krauss (01, 15), Kathleen Marie McShane (99), Mihaela Moscaliuc (19), Ester Partegàs (18), Huang Ruo (10, 12, 24), Rajee Samarasinghe (23), Accra Shepp (19), Nadia Shihab (17), Peter Shin (25), Rachel Shteir (90, 92), Molly Springfield (16), Rea Midori Tajiri (04, 22), Julie Tolentino (21), and Xinyang Wang (24).
The strong presence of MacDowell alumni among this year’s Guggenheim Fellows is no coincidence—it underscores the impact of environments that nurture reflection, focus, and creative community. For 118 years, MacDowell has provided artists with the time and space to pursue ambitious work, offering a retreat from the demands of daily life and artistic constraints. To date, 1,009 MacDowell Fellows have received this prestigious honor.
