A Long Beach City College professor has joined the 2025 centennial class of fine arts for the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, LBCC has announced.
The Guggenheim Fellowship offers support to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the “freest possible condition,” according to the fellowship’s website.
This 100th class of fellows includes 198 individuals working across 53 disciplines, including drawing and painting professor Carolyn Castaño, LBCC’s co-department head of visual and media arts.
The fellows were chosen through a rigorous application and peer-review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants. Fellows were selected based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise, officials said.
“This recognition is a powerful reminder of the caliber of faculty we are fortunate to have at Long Beach City College,” Uduak-Joe Ntuk, LBCC Board of Trustees president, said in a recent statement. “Professor Castaño’s selection as a Guggenheim Fellow reflects the high level of talent, dedication and scholarly excellence within our teaching ranks. Her achievements demonstrate what’s possible at a community college and shine a national spotlight on the incredible work at LBCC.”
Castaño was one of 32 recipients awarded in fine arts, according to a press release. There are four different fields: creative arts, social sciences, natural sciences and humanities.
Each fellow receives a monetary stipend up to $900,000 to pursue independent work. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows, according to its website.
“It’s not often that a community college faculty member receives this kind of national recognition, and that’s exactly why Professor Castaño’s Guggenheim Fellowship is so meaningful for our students,” Superintendent-President Mike Muñoz said in a statement earlier this month. “Her achievement sends a powerful message that excellence knows no boundaries – and that students at Long Beach City College are learning from some of the most talented, visionary educators in the country.”
Castaño is a Colombian American visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work focuses on painting, drawing, video and mixed-media installations — with themes and images originating in Latin and South America.
Her work – exhibited locally, nationally and internationally – uses eco-feminist frameworks in painting, installation, video and artist books to explore the landscape, migration, and female and family identities in works that juxtapose drawing, photography and performance with patterns found in textiles, design, and geometric abstraction, according to a press release.
She has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and a master’s in fine arts from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture. Castaño became a full-time instructor for LBCC in 2015.
Besides this fellowship, Castaño also received the 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in painting and drawing, the 2011 California Community Foundation Getty Fellow Mid-Career Grant, and the 2011 C.O.L.A.-City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship.
“I’m very honored to have received the 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship award and thrilled to be in the company of my thoughtful and talented colleagues in the arts,” Castaño said in a statement. “I’m looking forward to bringing the fruits of my research and the subsequent work to my Long Beach City College students, who continue to inspire me to stretch as an artist and a teacher.”