Distinguished alumna Caridad Svich ’85 was awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Svich, appointed in the field of Drama and Performance Art, is one of 188 international recipients chosen from more than 3,000 applicants through a rigorous application and peer review process.
Guggenheim Fellows are named because of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in a press release noted, “Humanity faces some profound existential challenges. The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It is a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
Since graduating from UNC Charlotte, Svich has written more than 40 full-length plays, a variety of short works and 15 translations. In 2012, she received an OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre and an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and the National New Play Network for the world premiere of “Guapa.” She also won the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play “The House of the Spirits,” based on the Isabel Allende novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice and has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times.
In 2018, Svich received the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Most recently, she received the 2023 Flora Roberts Award from The Dramatists Guild, awarded annually to a dramatist in recognition of distinguished work in the theatre.
Svich received the 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award in Theatre from the College of Arts + Architecture, and, in 2018, the Department of Theatre presented her play “Archipelago.”
Read more on the College of Arts + Architecture website.