‘Vigil’ by acclaimed author George Saunders kicks off the new Campus Reading Program
May 13, 2026
Steve Reinke, professor of art theory and practice, and Sera Young, professor of anthropology and global health, at Northwestern University are among the 2026 Guggenheim Fellows announced by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation earlier this week.
Fellowship applications rose by 50% in the creative arts and humanities and by 86% in the sciences, according to the foundation. Of the nearly 5,000 applicants, 223 fellows were selected based on prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows, among them are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies and recipients of many internationally recognized honors.
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators and creators in art, science and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
Steve Reinke is best known for his monologue-based video essays
Steve Reinke was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the category of film-video.
Reinke is professor of art theory and practice at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, artists’ writing, queer Nietzsche, the voice and psychoanalysis.
An artist and writer, he is best known for his monologue-based video essays. His work has been featured in many exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and was acquired for the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. His films have appeared at film festivals in Berlin, London, New York and the Sundance Film Festival.
His project, “The Hundred Videos,” was named one of the 150 essential works in Canadian cinematic history by the Toronto International Film Festival. “The Shimmering Beast,” a collection of his writings, was published in 2011. As a curator and critic, his projects include assembling a box set of George Kuchar’s video work for the Video Data Bank.
“The Guggenheim will allow me to add a few more components to ‘Final Thoughts,’ my ongoing film essay, with increased vigor and resources,” Reinke said.
Sera Young led the development of water insecurity scales
Sera Young was awarded a fellowship in the category of geography and environmental studies.
Young is a professor of anthropology and global health studies at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is the Morton O. Schapiro Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and co-director of the Center for Water Research at Northwestern.
To address problems with water quantity and quality, which are increasing in frequency and severity throughout the world, Young led the development of the Household Water Insecurity scales (HWISE) and Individual Water Insecurity scales (IWISE), the first cross-culturally equivalent way of measuring water access and use. These scales have been implemented in at least 90 countries by more than 100 governmental, policy, research and civil organizations.
Among her awards and honors are the 2022 Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award in Nutrition and Development from the American Society for Nutrition; a 2019 Carnegie Fellowship; and a 2013 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology.
“A Guggenheim Fellowship advances our work of measuring what matters when it comes to water,” Young said. “By measuring how water ‘shows up’ — or not— in everyday life, the Water Insecurity Experiences Scales help reveal the hidden costs of problems with water. The support for this work is a huge step towards improving global water security and puts a human face to a sector that has been dominated by rather, well, dry indicators.”
