Five Yale scholars and artists are among the 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows, a group of 223 individuals working across 55 disciplines.
Marlene Daut, Justin Driver, Haruna Lee, Matthew Leifheit, and Collier Schorr were selected by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants to be a part of the 101st class of fellows. Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to “pursue independent work at the highest level under the freest possible conditions,” the foundation said in a statement announcing the awards this week.
“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,” said Edward Hirsch, the foundation’s president and an award-winning poet.
Since its founding in 1925 by Senator Simon Guggenheim, the foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.
One of Yale’s recipients has a primary appointment in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and the remaining four have primary appointments at the university’s professional schools of law, drama, and art.
Marlene Daut, a professor of French and Black Studies in FAS, is a literary and intellectual historian of Haitian history and the Caribbean. Her most recent book, “The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe” (Knopf, 2025), won the 2026 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the 2025 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2025 Cundill History Prize. Her earlier book, “Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution” (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), was a co-winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Her articles on Haitian history and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, and other outlets.
Justin Driver, the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School, is a scholar of constitutional law. His first book, “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind” (Pantheon, 2018), received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. His most recent book, “The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education” (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His articles for general audiences have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Driver is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Haruna Lee, a lecturer in the playwriting program at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, is a Taiwanese Japanese American playwright and screenwriter. Lee’s play “Suicide Forest,” a New York Times Critic’s Pick, won an Obie Award for playwriting and conception in 2020; other plays include “War Lesbian” (2014), “Memory Retrograde” (2017), and “plural (love)” (2019). Lee’s work has been supported by a Steinberg Playwright Award, an Ollie Award, and a MacDowell Fellowship. Screenwriting credits include the AppleTV series “Pachinko” and the HBO Max series “The Flight Attendant.” In addition to teaching at Yale, they have taught playwriting and performance at many other institutions, including Brooklyn College, Stanford University, New York University, Pace University, and York College.
Matthew Leifheit ’17 M.F.A., a critic in photography in the Yale School of Art, is an American photographer, educator, and magazine editor. He holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art. Leifheit is editor-in-chief of MATTE Magazine, an independent platform for new ideas in photography founded in 2010. His work has been widely published, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, TIME, and Artforum, and exhibited internationally. He has received residencies at Yaddo and The Watermill Center, as well as grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale.
Collier Schorr, a visiting critic in photography at the Yale School of Art, is an artist and fashion photographer. She has previously served as a senior critic at the school. Her work has been exhibited internationally at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Kunstwerke in Berlin. Her works are held in many collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. Schorr is being honored by the International Center for Photography later this month with a 2026 Infinity Award for outstanding achievements in photography and art.
