Natalia Molina awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship
Natalia Molina, Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of American studies and ethnicity at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, joining a class of 223 scholars, artists and scientists selected from nearly 5,000 applicants worldwide.
The fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors in intellectual and creative life, provides recipients with the financial support to pursue independent work “under the freest possible conditions,” a mission the Guggenheim Foundation has maintained since the organization’s founding in 1925.
It’s not Molina’s first major accolade. In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, an honor often dubbed the “genius grant.”
Her Guggenheim fellowship marks both recognition of a career spent exploring race, citizenship and belonging in the United States and the opportunity to deepen that work through her current book project, Hidden Histories in the Garden. The book reveals the untold stories of laborers who helped to build and maintain the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
“I’m honored to receive the Guggenheim fellowship, which makes it possible to continue telling histories from the perspectives of those whose voices were never meant to be heard,” says Molina.
Drawing on census records, archival fragments, maps, photographs and rare interviews, Molina reconstructs the experiences of Mexican and Japanese workers who cultivated and maintained the estate’s landscapes and European immigrants who served as staff and estate engineers.
She also uncovers the historical context of the era, including the Indigenous communities dispossessed of their land and Chinese immigrants whose labor on the railroads helped to generate the wealth behind Harry Huntington’s empire.
These stories, often absent from official narratives, reveal how cultural institutions are influenced by broader histories of racial hierarchy and exclusion. “This project asks what it means to reframe cultural institutions through the experiences of those once rendered invisible, and what shifts when we center the stories that were silenced,” she says.
Her Guggenheim Fellowship cohort includes fellow USC professors Amy O’Neal of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and Jennifer West of the USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Molina joins a number of other USC Dornsife faculty who have received Guggenheim Fellowships, most recently Lisa Pon, professor of art history.