The 179 winners of Guggenheim Fellowships for 1999 were chosen from nearly 2,800 applicants--artists, playwrights, filmmakers, scientists, writers, scholars and researchers--in this 75th annual competition. The fellowships paid out this year by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation totaled over $6 million. The average award was $34,000.

Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The recommendations of the selection committee were approved by the foundation's board of trustees, which includes three new members who are past fellows--writer Joyce Carol Oates, playwright Wendy Wasserstein and composer Ellen Taafe Zwilich.

Guggenheim Fellows

Joel Spruck will apply mathematical skills to analyzing a 'soap bubble'

Mack Walker to study divergence of secular and religious language