From Art & Art History | Associate Professor Allison Grant has been awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced Tuesday. Grant was the sole UA faculty member named to the 101st class of Fellows, which includes 223 scholars and artists from 55 disciplines.
Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and associate professor of photography in The University of Alabama’s Department of Art & Art History. Her artworks have been widely exhibited and are held in collections nationwide, including at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, and the DePaul Art Museum. Recently, Grant’s debut photobook Within the Bittersweet (Composit Press, 2025) has been acquired by several collections and received press in numerous venues. Grant also serves as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies for Studio Art.
Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has honored talented mid-career scholars and artists across a variety of fields. From a highly-competitive pool of nearly 5,000 applicants in 2026, the foundation selected 223 Fellows based on both “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”
To date, the Foundation has supported 19,000 Fellows with nearly $450 million in fellowships.
Grant, one of 19 photographers in this year’s cohort, will use her fellowship to pursue a photography project titled “Holding Together.” A response to the “grim reality” of the post-Roe era, “Holding Together” is a photography series that features “women and individuals with uteruses [holding] botanicals historically used in reproductive care.” By centering plants like Queen Anne’s Lace, Rue, Pennyroyal, and Cohosh, Grant’s project offers, in her words, a “counter-narrative to the regressive control enforced by political systems in the Deep South and beyond.”
Grant is the first faculty member from the UA Department of Art & Art History to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. World-renowned photographer and department alum William Christenberry was named a Fellow in 1984. Department chair Jason Guynes called Grant’s award an “extraordinary and well-deserved honor.”
“The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most respected recognitions an artist can receive, and it speaks to the strength, seriousness, and national significance of Allison’s work,” Guynes continued. “As a department, we are immensely proud of her.”
Read the full press release from the Guggenheim Foundation here.