Two Artists from UC Irvine Join the Guggenheim Foundation's 101st Class of Fellows

ANNOUNCING THE 2026 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS

Department of Art professor Monica Majoli and M.F.A. alumna Samira Yamin are named among 223 fellows across 55 disciplines

Two members of UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts have been awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the nation's highest honors for scholarly and creative excellence. Department of Art professor Monica Majoli and alumna Samira Yamin, M.F.A. '11, were selected by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants for the Foundation's 101st class of fellows. They join 223 artists, writers and scholars across 55 disciplines in receiving the acclaimed grant, which supports individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or creative ability in the arts.

“We are incredibly proud of Monica Majoli’s excellence as an artist, scholar and visionary leader in her field,” said Tiffany López, Claire Trevor Dean of the Arts. “Her recognition, alongside alumna Samira Yamin, reflects the extraordinary creative and scholarly contributions of our community. With 27 Guggenheim Fellows among our art faculty and alumni, this moment speaks to the depth of talent at UC Irvine. We are excited to see what Monica will accomplish in this next chapter and how her work will continue to shape and inspire her students.”

"To be recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation for my work overall is a deep honor, especially as I enter the fourth decade of my career," said Majoli. "I’m particularly encouraged by their support for my proposal, Ovulars, a body of work I began last year that focuses on pioneering lesbian-feminist artists working in photography in rural Oregon in the late 1970s and early 80s. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support my studio work and fund my archival research on these lesbian-feminist artists in Oregon, Washington, D.C. and Northern California over the course of one year. I’m absolutely elated!"

Founded in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowship program has a storied legacy of supporting artists and scholars at the forefront of their fields. Since its founding, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows across the fine arts, social sciences, humanities and natural sciences.

"I'm honored and grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for supporting my project, Luminous Zones, which expands on my past work on fire as a pervasive photographic subject but is a departure in form, scale and scope of images," shared Yamin. "This project considers fire in varied contexts, including war, natural disaster, protest, candlelight vigils, etc, but remains fundamentally about creating opportunities for critical and dynamic viewership of images. As fire both illuminates and attracts, I’m looking to historical theories of optics to consider the philosophical implications of shifting positionalities of viewership. Do we go to the world or does the world come to us? And the responsibilities they bear."

About the 2026 Guggenheim Fellows

Monica Majoli is a professor of art at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts, where she has been faculty since 2006. Her practice is rooted in painting, printmaking and drawing, and engages the documentary photograph, exploring how sexuality and intimacy are shaped by personal experience and larger cultural histories. Majoli has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery and Galerie Buchholz in New York, Air de Paris in France and Hoffman Donahue Gallery in Los Angeles, among others. Her work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial and the Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute. She is a recipient of the Mohn Career Achievement Award (2021) and a Fellows of Contemporary Art fellowship (2006), and has taught at UCLA, UC Berkeley and the Yale University School of Art Graduate Studies program. A comprehensive artist’s monograph, Monica Majoli: Works 1990-2026 will be released in June, edited by Kathrin Bentele, in collaboration with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, following her recent exhibition Monica Majoli: Distant Lover 2009-2024 at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 2024-2025.

Samira Yamin, M.F.A. '11, is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice takes the form of a sustained critique of the way images are used to narrate what she describes as "a nebulous Middle East" as a place of perpetual war. Working primarily with appropriated war photography, Yamin employs tactics that subvert representation to reveal the formal and structural elements used to construct those narratives. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and includes a 2022 public commission for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency. She currently teaches at ArtCenter College of Design and has been awarded grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, California Community Foundation and Harpo Foundation, among others.

With the addition of Majoli and Yamin as Guggenheim recipients, Claire Trevor School of the Arts continues to make a global impact in art and scholarship. Their fellowships underscore the strength of UC Irvine's faculty and alumni network, which nurtures the next generation of creative leaders. UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts now counts 27 Guggenheim Fellows from the Department of Art, including six current faculty members.

UC Irvine Art Guggenheim Fellows

2026 
Monica Majoli, professor of art 
Samira Yamin, M.F.A. '11

2025
Coleman Collins, assistant professor
Phil Chang, B.A. '97
Charisse Weston, M.F.A. '19
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2024
Gina Osterloh, M.F.A. ’07
Lorraine O'Grady, assistant professor
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2022
Bruce Yonemoto, professor emeritust
Alison O'Daniel, M.F.A. ’10
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2020
Jennifer Pastor, professor of art
Rheim Alkadhi, M.F.A. ’99
Stacy Kranitz, M.F.A. ’14
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2019
Daniel Joseph Martinez, professor of art
Hồng-Ân Trương, M.F.A. ’08
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2017
Ken Gonzalez-Day, M.F.A. ’95
James Luna, ’77*

2015
Miles Coolidge, professor of art
Russell Crotty, M.F.A. ’80

2014
Yong Soon Min, professor emerita*

2013
Kim Abeles, M.F.A. ’80

2008
Simon Leung, professor of art
Ruben Ochoa, M.F.A. ’03

1988 
Yvonne Rainer, professor emerita

1978 
Chris Burden, M.F.A. ’71*

1974 
Michael Asher, B.A. ’66*

1969 
John Coplans, professor emeritus*
Yvonne Rainer, professor emerita

1960 
John Paul Jones, professor emeritus*

*deceased