Visual artist Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano (MFA ’98), an alum of Tyler’s Photography program, has been selected to receive a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. 

The illustrious fellowships, administered annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, are awarded to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.  

Mozman is among 188 highly accomplished scholars, artists, photographers, scientists, and writers who were chosen for this year’s award from nearly 3,000 initial candidates through a rigorous peer review process.  

“Receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship is an enormous honor because it offers recognition that is sometimes missing from one’s day-to-day art practice,” Mozman said. “It gives an incredible sense of support.” 

The award is designed to support a project lasting six to 12 months, allowing recipients the opportunity to independently pursue creative and scholarly projects. 

Mozman, whose primary mediums are photography and video, is currently working on a project of photographs and collages titled Venas Abiertas. The project, whose title  translates to Open Veins in English, “give[s] voice to the complex, and painful story of U.S. policy in Central America, the border, and policy towards Latinx people.”    

She is also working on a new project, titled Historia del Origen/Origen Story, that will be made between Portobelo, Panama and Mozman’s studio in Brooklyn, NY.  

Mozman’s photographs and moving images explore the relationship between documentary and fictional narratives, often starting from her biographical experience and family history. Her work explores how culture shapes individuals and how behavior is conditioned by one’s environment.   

“My still and moving images connect history to our present; motivated by stories told and those hidden, reinforced by structures of power — including the internalized kind,” Mozman wrote of her work, noting that her art practice is also informed by her clinical practice as a psychoanalyst.    

Reflecting on her time at Tyler, Mozman shared, “I had a very important professor who helped me greatly in my Fulbright application, which I won upon graduating. I learned from this professor the importance of supporting students who are learning the hard process of writing difficult grant and fellowship applications and navigating an art career.” 

In addition to her Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, Mozman has been awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship and the NYC Film and Media Grant from the Jerome Foundation, among others. She is a recipient of the Colen Brown Art Prize and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award and has completed residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace, Smack Mellon, Baxter St at Camera Club of New York, and Light Work. 

Mozman has exhibited in many museums worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C; the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA, and the Instituto Cultural Itau in São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a faculty appointment as a professor of the practice in the Photography Department at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts.