Sivan Cohen Elias, a composer and assistant professor in the School of Music in the College of Liberal Arts on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, has been awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Cohen Elias’ selection comes after a rigorous application and peer review process, one in which just 223 individuals were selected from almost 5,000 applicants based on outstanding achievement and exceptional promise.
“I am thrilled and deeply honored to be named a Guggenheim Fellow. To receive this recognition in the current social-political climate makes my work feel even more urgent in its reflection on absurdity, surreality and miscommunication,” said Cohen Elias. “During my Guggenheim Fellowship, I will create a series of multimedia electroacoustic works focusing on extending my creative integration of puppetry-like performance elements, with works including a flute-cello duo, a piece for a large ensemble and a collaboration with a German opera house for the creation of a chamber opera.”
Cohen Elias is a composer and electroacoustic performer and improviser, combining modified and digitally extended musical instruments, objects, body gestures and video. As noted by The New York Times, Cohen Elias often “deconstructs the instruments themselves” to establish extended sonic environments consisting of multi-layered sonic textures and timbres, composed with puppetry-esque performance elements. Her work fuses music and gesture, suspense and humor, and harmonic noises, while exploring social and psychological themes, such as illusion, entanglement and the intertwining of human, animal and machine.
“Dr. Cohen Elias approaches composition and performance with uncommon imagination and intellectual depth, opening new ways of experiencing sound. Her work reflects the inventive, multidisciplinary scholarship we deeply value at the University of Minnesota,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Gretchen Ritter. “Importantly, she challenges students to experiment and to take creative risks as they develop dynamic artistic practices — truly essential skills for our students. This Guggenheim Fellowship is a fitting recognition of her distinctive voice and growing international impact, and we are proud to celebrate this milestone in her career.”
Cohen Elias was previously awarded the McKnight Composer Fellowship in 2024 and a Fromm Foundation commission in 2020. She has been selected for a two-week residency in 2027 at the Experimental Electronic Studio in Freiburg, Germany.
About the College of Liberal Arts
For more than 150 years, the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) has played a central and enduring role in shaping lives, for the good of Minnesota and the world. CLA is the largest college in the University of Minnesota system with nearly 500 world-class faculty members instructing more than 12,000 undergraduate and 1,400 graduate students. CLA is home to 31 academic departments and 20+ interdisciplinary research centers in the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Learn more at cla.umn.edu.
About the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2026 Fellows and their projects, visit the Foundation’s website.
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