VCUarts Dance alumnus Eleanor Smith (BFA ’06) has been awarded a prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships. Eleanor Smith is a choreographer, freelance dancer, and single mother living and working in Brooklyn, NY. For the past 20 years, Eleanor has been collaborating with Molly Lieber and their work explores a relationship to improvisation as a feminist exclamation where the methodology depends on knowing and caring for one another. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY.
According to the Guggenheim Fellowship website this years fellows “includ[e] 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.” President of the Guggenheim Foundation and award-winning poet, Edward Hirsch, described the 2026 fellowship class as being “representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship.”
View more information about Smith and Lieber’s work on their website.
