The 2024 fellows of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation have been announced. Included in the list of 188 appointees are Broadway playwrights Martyna Majok and Joshua Harmon.
Founded in 1925 by senator John Simon Guggenheim, the fellowship provides honorees with a monetary stipend to pursue projects under the “freest possible conditions.”
“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said poet and foundation president Edward Hirsch in a statement. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
Majok received a 2023 Best Play Tony Award nomination for “Cost of Living,” which played Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in fall 2022. The drama, which explores the relationships between individuals with and without disabilities, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2018. Majok will adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” for the Broadway-aimed musical “Gatsby,” which will play American Repertory Theater in May.
Harmon’s drama “Prayer for the French Republic” played an extended run at the Friedman this season. Winner of the 2022 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play for its Off-Broadway run, the play examines several generations of a French Jewish family as they explore a sense of home amidst rising anti-Semitism. Harmon, who also won the 2018 Outstanding Play Drama Desk for Off-Broadway’s “Admissions,” made his Broadway debut with 2017’s “Significant Other.”
The full list of the 2024 Guggenheim fellowship recipients can be found here.
