This was very quietly announced a few days ago, but it is
excellent news nevertheless that both filmmakers Terence Nance (pictured above) and Marco Williams were named, along 177 other recipients, this year’s
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships.

Both Williams and Nance received their
fellowships in the Creative Arts category in Film and Video.

The fellowship, which was first established in 1925 to “assist
and further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage
in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under
the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed,” is awarded on the basis of impressive achievement in the past, and
exceptional promise for the future.

Nance is, of course, a performance artist, musician, photographer
and filmmaker, whose first feature film – An
Oversimplication of Her Beauty – premiered at the Sundance Film Festival
in 2012, and was theatrically released
by Variance Films.

Williams is a documentary filmmaker, and a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the
Arts; and among his films are: The Undocumented, Banished; Freedom Summer, The Legacy of
Brown v. Board of Education; MLK Boulevard; The Concrete Dream; Two Towns of
Jasper; In Search of Our Fathers; and From Harlem to Harvard.

Congratulations to the both of them; well deserved.