San Francisco playwrightMichael Gene Sullivan,who is also a collective member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, is one of 180 Guggenheim Fellows among the 2022 cohort, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced Thursday, April 7. He’s among a baker’s dozen of Bay Area recipients.
Awardees are veterans of a range of fields spanning the arts and sciences, and typical grant amounts range from $30,000 to $45,000. Other recent grantees in theater includeBrandon Jacobs-Jenkins,Lloyd Suhand Dohee Lee.
Over the fellowship’s nearly 100 years of existence, history makers such as famed writers Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin as well as choreographer Martha Graham have also been fellows.
Sullivan told The Chronicle he’ll learn his grant amount in the coming weeks and that he plans to use the fellowship to write a play about Ida B. Wells and her husband, Ferdinand Lee Barnett, who were both journalists and activists. He called their story “history and politics that should be known.”
Other Bay Area Guggenheim fellows include:
- Patricia Alessandrini, composer, Palo Alto; assistant professor of music, Stanford University
- Anne Bluethenthal, choreographer, San Francisco
- Nicholas Bloom, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University
- Jennifer DeVere Brody, professor of theater and performance studies, Stanford University
- Christy Chan, artist, Richmond
- Sam Contis, photographer, Oakland
- Vera Gribanova, associate professor of linguistics and director of the graduate program, Stanford University
- Jodi Halpern, professor of bioethics, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley
- Janis Crystal Lipzin, filmmaker, Sebastopol
- Osagie K. Obasogie, Haas Distinguished Chair, professor of law, professor of bioethics, UC Berkeley School of Law and School of Public Health
- Mimi Plumb, photographer, Berkeley
- Lysley Tenorio, writer, San Francisco; professor of English, St. Mary’s College of California
- Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, Stanford University
For more information, visitwww.gf.org.