Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded To Queens College Arts Faculty
Photos: Queens College|Facebook|Wikimedia Commons Two members of the Queens College faculty have been awarded coveted Guggenheim Fellowships for 2026. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, associate professor of media studies, and Molly Rose Lieber, adjunct assistant professor of dance and women’s and gender studies, will receive stipends supporting their respective projects in film and dance. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most competitive and desirable faculty awards in the world. As a public institution with a longstanding commitment to the arts and humanities, we are delighted to see our faculty honored in this way,” says Queens College President Frank H. Wu. “Professors Lieber and Hunt-Ehrlich both add tremendously to campus culture and, equally, students’ learning opportunities.” Guggenheim Fellowships offer unrestricted grants, allowing recipients the freedom to pursue their dream projects. Lieber and Hunt-Ehrlich were appointed to the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, whose members faced stiff competition and rigorous peer review: applications this year rose by 50% in the creative arts and humanities and 86% in the sciences. The 101st class comprises 223 artists, scientists, and scholars chosen from nearly 5,000 applicants in 55 fields and 97 institutions, hailing from the United States, Canada, and eight other countries. Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, describes the 2026 Fellows as “representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship.” Hunt-Ehrlich, an associate professor of media studies, teaches film and television production. An accomplished filmmaker whose work often explores the inner lives of Black women, she was featured among Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema” in 2020. She has received the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Film, a 2022 Creative Capitol Award, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her first feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, premiered at the 2024 International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center. Her Guggenheim Fellowship will support completion of her second feature film, The Last Photograph, which is currently in development. With a feature-length screenplay, it is part melodrama, part allegory about cameras, and part elegy to a fading era of photography. As Hunt-Ehrlich explains, “The Last Photograph is the culmination of themes I’ve long explored in my filmmaking practice: memory, identity, and the enduring presence of the photographic archive. My body of work includes numerous short films, film installations, and one feature film, all examining these concerns.” Lieber, who holds an MFA in dance and a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Rutgers University, Bennington College, and the New School. Winner of the 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer, she has performed in works by luciana achugar, Malcolm-x Betts, Oren Barnoy, Keely Garfield, Maria Hassabi, Antonio Ramos, Melinda Ring, Donna Uchizono, and other experimental artists. Lieber’s recent project with Wally Cardona, TIMESFOUR/David Gordon:1975/2025, was named a Best Dance Performance of 2025 by the New York Times and is scheduled for May 27–30 at the American Dance Festival. An experienced teacher, she says that “Teaching at Queens College is a real joy for me, every class.” Lieber was awarded a fellowship for choreography of a complex project titled Garden, as was fellow artist Eleanor Smith. Their nonprofit organization Lieber and Smith, Inc., provides a platform for marginalized voices. Garden serves as a feminist exploration of nature, embodiment, and reciprocity. Lieber describes it as “a practice of consensus with the environment and recontextualizing femme iconography through movements and mirrored tableaus in nature. Botanical installations framed by mirrors reciprocate the animacy of nature as a means to exalt it. Birth and Death are positioned as femme bodies in harmony with the natural world.” Since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in Guggenheim Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals who have been leaders in their fields. Many have gone on to win top honors elsewhere, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. These fellowships have supported many important figures in the arts, such as Zora Neale Hurston, e.e. cummings, James Baldwin, Robert Frank, and Martha Graham.
Black News 
Photos: Queens College|Facebook|Wikimedia Commons
Two members of the Queens College faculty have been awarded coveted Guggenheim Fellowships for 2026. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, associate professor of media studies, and Molly Rose Lieber, adjunct assistant professor of dance and women’s and gender studies, will receive stipends supporting their respective projects in film and dance.
“The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most competitive and desirable faculty awards in the world. As a public institution with a longstanding commitment to the arts and humanities, we are delighted to see our faculty honored in this way,” says Queens College President Frank H. Wu. “Professors Lieber and Hunt-Ehrlich both add tremendously to campus culture and, equally, students’ learning opportunities.”
Guggenheim Fellowships offer unrestricted grants, allowing recipients the freedom to pursue their dream projects. Lieber and Hunt-Ehrlich were appointed to the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, whose members faced stiff competition and rigorous peer review: applications this year rose by 50% in the creative arts and humanities and 86% in the sciences. The 101st class comprises 223 artists, scientists, and scholars chosen from nearly 5,000 applicants in 55 fields and 97 institutions, hailing from the United States, Canada, and eight other countries. Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, describes the 2026 Fellows as “representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship.”
Hunt-Ehrlich, an associate professor of media studies, teaches film and television production. An accomplished filmmaker whose work often explores the inner lives of Black women, she was featured among Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema” in 2020. She has received the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Film, a 2022 Creative Capitol Award, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her first feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, premiered at the 2024 International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center.
Her Guggenheim Fellowship will support completion of her second feature film, The Last Photograph, which is currently in development. With a feature-length screenplay, it is part melodrama, part allegory about cameras, and part elegy to a fading era of photography. As Hunt-Ehrlich explains, “The Last Photograph is the culmination of themes I’ve long explored in my filmmaking practice: memory, identity, and the enduring presence of the photographic archive. My body of work includes numerous short films, film installations, and one feature film, all examining these concerns.”
Lieber, who holds an MFA in dance and a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Rutgers University, Bennington College, and the New School. Winner of the 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer, she has performed in works by luciana achugar, Malcolm-x Betts, Oren Barnoy, Keely Garfield, Maria Hassabi, Antonio Ramos, Melinda Ring, Donna Uchizono, and other experimental artists. Lieber’s recent project with Wally Cardona, TIMESFOUR/David Gordon:1975/2025, was named a Best Dance Performance of 2025 by the New York Times and is scheduled for May 27–30 at the American Dance Festival. An experienced teacher, she says that “Teaching at Queens College is a real joy for me, every class.”
Lieber was awarded a fellowship for choreography of a complex project titled Garden, as was fellow artist Eleanor Smith. Their nonprofit organization Lieber and Smith, Inc., provides a platform for marginalized voices. Garden serves as a feminist exploration of nature, embodiment, and reciprocity. Lieber describes it as “a practice of consensus with the environment and recontextualizing femme iconography through movements and mirrored tableaus in nature. Botanical installations framed by mirrors reciprocate the animacy of nature as a means to exalt it. Birth and Death are positioned as femme bodies in harmony with the natural world.”
Since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in Guggenheim Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals who have been leaders in their fields. Many have gone on to win top honors elsewhere, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. These fellowships have supported many important figures in the arts, such as Zora Neale Hurston, e.e. cummings, James Baldwin, Robert Frank, and Martha Graham.
