4 USC faculty members honored as Guggenheim Fellows

Four USC faculty members have been named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows, joining a class of 223 scholars, artists and scientists selected from nearly 5,000 applicants worldwide.

The fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors in intellectual and creative life, provides recipients with the financial support to pursue independent work “under the freest possible conditions,” a mission the Guggenheim Foundation has maintained since the organization’s founding in 1925.

The USC honorees are:

• Kyle Abraham, Claude and Alfred Mann Endowed Professor of Dance at the USC Kaufman School of Dance.
• Natalia Molina, Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
• Amy O’Neal, lecturer in dance history, hip-hop and composition at USC Kaufman.
• Jennifer West, professor of practice of fine arts at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.

According to Guggenheim President Edward Hirsch, the 2026 Fellows represent the world’s best thinkers, innovators and creators in art, science and scholarship.

“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,” Hirsch said. “We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

Fellows were selected through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 candidates. Members of the 2026 class were chosen based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.

Kyle Abraham

Known for his innovation as a choreographer, dancer and artistic director, Abraham is the founder of the groundbreaking Brooklyn-based dance company A.I.M. He joined the USC Kaufman faculty in the fall of 2021.

In addition to being named a Guggenheim Fellow, Abraham has been the recipient of several other prestigious honors. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation, which noted his work as “a choreographer and dancer probing the relationship between identity and personal history through a unique hybrid of traditional and vernacular dance styles that speaks to a new generation of dancers and audiences.”

His work has been shared throughout the world, including notable venues in the United States, from New York City Center to Lincoln Center to Brooklyn Academy of Music to The Joyce Theater.

Abraham received a Princess Grace Award for choreography in 2010 and a Princess Grace Statue Award in 2018. In 2019, he received a Bessie Award for exceptional dance and performance in his original production The Radio Show. In 2012, Abraham was a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award recipient and Ford Fellow. The following year, he served as a choreographic contributor for Beyoncé’s British Vogue cover shoot.

Among many other career accolades, he was a 2016 Doris Duke Award recipient. Most recently, Abraham received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from his undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Purchase College, earlier this month.

Natalia Molina

Molina’s Guggenheim Fellowship marks both recognition of a career spent exploring race, citizenship and belonging in the United States and the opportunity to deepen that work through her current book project, Hidden Histories in the Garden. The book reveals the untold stories of laborers who helped to build and maintain The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino.

Drawing on census records, archival fragments, maps, photographs and rare interviews, Molina reconstructs the experiences of Mexican and Japanese workers who cultivated and maintained the estate’s landscapes and European immigrants who served as staff and estate engineers.

She also uncovers the historical context of the era, including the Indigenous communities dispossessed of their land and Chinese immigrants whose labor on the railroads helped to generate the wealth behind Henry E. Huntington’s empire.

These stories, often absent from official narratives, reveal how cultural institutions are influenced by broader histories of racial hierarchy and exclusion. “This project asks what it means to reframe cultural institutions through the experiences of those once rendered invisible, and what shifts when we center the stories that were silenced,” she said.

“I’m honored to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship, which makes it possible to continue telling histories from the perspectives of those whose voices were never meant to be heard,” Molina said.

It’s not Molina’s first major accolade: In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Amy O’Neal

After more than two decades as a dancer, choreographer and dance educator in Seattle, O’Neal relocated to Los Angeles in 2016. Two years later, she joined the faculty at USC Kaufman, where she teaches hip-hop, house and hybrid hip-hop contemporary and improvisation techniques, and lectures on Black social dance history, practices and media literacy.

O’Neal’s passion and research meet at the intersection of the hip-hop, house and contemporary dance communities, where she explores the “nuances and layers of hybridized movement vocabularies.” Her evening-length work Opposing Forces toured from 2014 to 2017, and a documentary about the show, How it Feels, premiered in 2019.

As a guest practitioner of Black dance culture, O’Neal has participated in experimental, all-styles battles and house dance battles, co-organized and co-produced Seattle House Dance Project, and developed hip-hop curriculum for the University of Washington. Since 2019, she has been creating experimental dance work, centering on the people and practices of hip-hop and house culture, while directly addressing race, gender and the nature of innovation.

Prior to being named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, O’Neal received grants from Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and 4Culture. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB Vienna scholar and Herb Alpert Award nominee. In 2014, she received the inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award from Cornish College of the Arts, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Jennifer West

West is a Los Angeles-based artist who has explored the materiality of film for over two decades. She is a 2025-2026 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.

Her work spans large-scale moving image installations and site-specific interventions, with major projects commissioned by the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, the High Line in New York, Frieze Los Angeles, LIAF Biennial, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Aspen Art Museum, among others. In 2022, Radius Books published Jennifer West: Media Archaeology, launched at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the occasion of Typofilm: Jennifer West.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Times Square Arts, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Seattle Art Museum, S1 Artspace in Sheffield (United Kingdom), Kunstverein Nürnberg (Germany), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Joan Los Angeles, MAN Museo d’arte Provincia di Nuoro, Tramway Glasgow and White Columns in New York, and included in major group exhibitions at the Barbican in London, CAPC in Bordeaux, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Whitney Museum and the Drawing Center in New York. Her work is held in leading public collections including LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Museum, Kadist, MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), MOCA Los Angeles, the Thoma Collection, Rubell Collection and the Saatchi Collection.

Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Frieze, Mousse Magazine and Mubi Notebook. She has served as director of USC Roski’s MFA Art program since 2021.