On Tuesday, April 15, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation celebrated its centennial with the announcement of the 2025 class of Guggenheim Fellows. Joining the foundation’s 100th class of 198 “distinguished individuals” working across 53 disciplines are CalArts alumni and faculty.
School of Art faculty Julie Tolentino is named as a notable individual in the Fine Arts category. Tolentino, who joined Art’s permanent faculty in fall 2022, is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation, performance, texts, and “scent [and] object-making.” Her works have been exhibited in solo and group shows around the globe, as well as the 2022 Whitney Biennial with Ivy Kwan Arce.
Visual artist, filmmaker, and photographer Rea Tajiri (Art BFA 80, MFA 82) was named in the Film-Video category. She earned a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association for her early documentary short “History and Memory: For Akiko & Takashige,” and has since screened her films internationally, as well as earned accolades from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Leeway Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, NEA Visual Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. This past February, Tajiri was named a 2025 United States Artists Fellow.
Also in the Film-Video category is fellow alum Travis Wilkerson (Film/Video MFA 01), an independent filmmaker and performance artist characterized by international film magazine Sight & Sound as “the political conscience of American cinema.” Wilkerson’s latest feature film Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing debuted at the 2024 Berlinale.
Los Angeles-based artist and educator Phil D. Chang (Art MFA 05) is named a fellow in the Photography category. His works are held in the public collections of several institutions, including the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chang’s solo show Process, Object, Residue exhibited last year at the Penumbra Foundation in New York City.
School of Theater faculty Lars Jan (Theater-IM MFA 08) is among the 2025 Drama & Performance Art Fellows. A director, writer, and visual artist, his works have exhibited at BAM Next Wave Festival, Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theatre, Whitney Museum, Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT, CAP UCLA, Istanbul Modern, Toronto Nuit Blanche, London’s Burning Festival, Poland’s Divine Comedy Festival, and elsewhere. Jan is the founder of the genre-bending performance and art lab Early Morning Opera, and the winner of the 2017 Audemars Piguet Art Commission.
Also named in the category is playwright, director, and former School of Theater Dean Erik Ehn—a 2001 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts recipient and co-founder and co-artistic director of the San Francisco-based Tenderloin Opera Company.
“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,” Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch was quoted in the official press release. “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.”
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals.
