Light Work Congratulates 2022 Guggenheim Fellows

Five Light Work Artists-in-Residence among 2022 Guggenheim Fellows

Light Work offers enthusiastic congratulations to current Light Work artist-in-residence Gary Burnley (2022), former residency participants Kelli Connell (2008), Odette England (2021), Nancy Floyd (1998), and former AIR and Kathleen Ellis Gallery exhibiting artist Keliy Anderson-Staley (2010, 2011) for being named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows. The Guggenheim is one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for scholarly and artistic achievement, honoring individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

In all, this year’s recipients represent fifty-one scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, eighty-one academic institutions, thirty-one states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces. Many Guggenheim recipients respond directly to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism in their projects. The exceptionally rigorous application and peer review process selects each year’s recipients from almost 2,500 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

We can proudly offer a signed fine print, photobook, and Contact Sheet volumes that feature works by this year’s Guggenheim recipients. Proceeds benefit and champion Light Work’s ongoing support of emerging and under-represented artists working in photography through residencies, publications, exhibitions, educational programming, and a community-access digital lab facility. Search all our offerings at lightwork.org/shop.


Odette England
2021 Residency / 2021 Photobook Award Recipient

Odette England, Dairy Character
Saint Lucy Books / Light Work
188 pages / First Editon
Signed by the artist

Odette England is an artist and writer who uses photography, performance, writing, and the archive to explore themes of autobiography, land, gender, and ritual. She edited the critically acclaimed book, Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph (Schilt, 2020). Public collections holding England’s work include the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Texas A&M University. In 2021, Radius Books published her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg. England was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2021.


Keliy Anderson-Staley
2010 Residency / 2011 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Keliy Anderson-Staley, Kevin, 2010
Pigmented inkjet print (from a wet-plate collodion tintype), 10 x 8″
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist

[Hyphen] Americans
Contact Sheet 163: Keliy Anderson-Staley
Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Light Work (September 1, 2011)

For her series [Hyphen] Americans, Keliy Anderson-Staley created a vast, broadly diverse collection of portraits with the wet-plate collodion process, using nineteenth-century chemical recipes, period brass lenses, and large wooden view cameras. Each individual—identified only by a first name—asserts his or her self, resisting any imposed external categorizing system. At once contemporary and timeless, these portraits raise questions about our place as individuals in history and the role that photographic technologies have played over time in defining identity.


You can find works by and essays about 2022 Guggenheim recipients in Contact Sheet Annuals 102, 152, 162, and 163. Light Work designs and prints Contact Sheet in the tradition of fine art photography monographs and is completely commercial-free. We invite you to see first-hand the innovative and creative work of artists who are making important contributions to the field of photography.

Over Light Work’s nearly fifty year history, thirty-six of our artists-in-residence, photobook award recipients, and exhibiting artists have received the Guggenheim Fellowship. These include Sama Al Shaibi, Dawoud Bey, Doug DuBois, John Gossage, Elijah Gowin, Deana Lawson, Christian Patterson, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Cindy Sherman, Cauleen Smith, Mark Steinmetz, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Hank Willis Thomas. We are humbled and honored to provide time, space, and resources for so many of these artists early in—and throughout—their careers. We extend our congratulations to all the 2022 Guggenheim recipients on joining this illustrious body of artists and the legacy that represents. 


See the list of new Fellows here.