Tiffinbox

Inspiring Photographers

Guggenheim Fellowships: Four Desi Winners

by

Via Arun Venugopal

“You must apply to the Guggenheim Foundation to be considered in one of its annual competitions for Fellowships. The Foundation receives from 3500 to 4000 applications each year and is able to make about 220 grants. No one who applies is guaranteed success in the competition. There is no pre-screening. Applicants will be matched against others working in their own field and then against all others in the competition in a rigorous selection process. The work of artists will be reviewed by artists, scientists by scientists, historians by historians. The Foundation has a network of several hundred advisers who either meet at the Foundation offices to look at applicants' work or receive application materials to read locally. These advisers then submit reports on their ranking of the applicants in their respective fields. After this review, a final Committee of Selection weighs the applications field by field and determines how many awards to make in each area.”

Four desis have won the coveted Guggenheim Fellowships this year.

Pico Iyer, Writer, Santa Barbara, California: Reflections on the fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Rohinton Mistry, Writer, Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Fiction.
Santosh Srinivas Vempala, Associate Professor of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Algorithmic convex geometry.
Meenakshi Wadhwa, Curator of Meteoritics, Field Museum, Chicago: Analysis of solar wind returned by the Genesis spacecraft.

Seshu | Editor & Publisher

Seshu | Editor & Publisher

Seshu is an Avon, Connecticut based headshot photographer and family portrait photographer. He edits and publishes Tiffinbox and produces Tiffincast for photographers like you!