Jeremiah Ariaz Awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship
Fourth Estate, by Jeremiah Ariaz.
Jeremiah Ariaz, professor of art/photography, has been awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, as part of the Guggenheim Foundation’s 101st Class of Fellows of trailblazing artists, scientists, and scholars across 55 fields.
Ariaz will focus his fellowship on his project The Fourth Estate in the Heart of America, a photographic and editorial project documenting newspaper offices as a celebration of local journalism’s civic role and a lament for its decline.
His photographs examine the constructs of American identity within personal, community, and political contexts.
“On behalf of my colleagues in the School of Art I’m very pleased and proud to congratulate Jeremiah Ariaz on receiving the recognition that this top-level award represents,” said Rod Parker, director of the LSU School of Art. “The long-standing tradition of support for photography from the Guggenheim Foundation aligns with LSU’s decades-long fine art photography tradition which his work, and the work of all our faculty exemplifies.”
“I’m very excited and humbled to share that I’ve been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. What an honor to be amongst the 101st class of fellows across 55 disciplines, and share the honor with so many distinguished artists and thinkers I admire,” Ariaz said.
Ariaz is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including an ATLAS grant, the Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the 2018 South Arts Finalist Prize and he was named the 2018 Louisiana State Fellow. A monograph of his photographs, Louisiana Trail Riders (2018) is available from UL Press. His photographs have been featured in publications including Oxford American, The Paris Review and The New York Times. His writing has been published in the Symphony in the Flint Hills Field Journal, Southern Cultures and The Washington Post.
His recent publication, The Kansas Mirror: The Fourth Estate in the Heart of America (2023) features newspaper offices across his home state. Read more.
His photographs have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including venues such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, GA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Jacksonville, FL), the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Durham, NC), Zeitgeist Gallery (Nashville, TN), Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art (Manhattan, KS), the Acadiana Center For The Arts (Lafayette, LA), Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN), B Gallery (Rome, Italy), Photographic Gallery (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico) The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (Hong Kong, China).
He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has taught at the LSU School of Art since 2006.
About the Guggenheim Fellowship
The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced their appointment of the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows in April 2026, including 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “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. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
The Guggenheim Foundation has always been committed to awarding Fellowships at the highest level. Since its founding in 1925, the Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 Fellows. This year, applications in the Creative Arts and Humanities were up by 50% and applications in the Sciences were up by 86%. At a time when intellectual and creative life is under attack, the Foundation continues to demonstrate its commitment to supporting extraordinary individuals breaking new ground in the Creative Arts, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and a range of interdisciplinary fields.
In all, 55 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 97 academic institutions, 33 US states and the District of Columbia, three Canadian provinces, and eight countries beyond the United States and Canada are represented in the 2026 class. The Fellows range in age from 28 to 76, and around one third do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university.
“Fellows’ projects grapple with timeless themes and timely issues. They explore the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, propose life-changing advancements in medical technology, unearth the historical roots of contemporary crises, and forge new directions in artistic expression.”
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