And then there were six (Yale Guggenheim winners)

The saying that bad news travels faster than good news may explain the delayed arrival of the really good news that a total of six Yale affiliates received 2017 Guggenheim Fellowships.

First, YaleNews was officially notified that three faculty members had received the prestigious award. Then came the report that there was a fourth winner from the university.

Now further investigation has revealed that two Yale lecturers — Elana Herzog and Brian Seibert — also won Guggenheim Fellowships this year.

The fellowship winners are appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. The Yale recipients were among the 173 scholars, artists, and scientists chosen for this year’s award from among almost 3,000 applicants.

Bios of the newly discovered recipients follow:

Elana Herzog

Elana Herzog has been a lecturer at Yale School of Art since 2012. The artist finds and collects non-precious materials that are often second-hand, discarded or cheaply mass produced. By converting these into “fine art,” she seeks to raise questions of value, ownership and conservation. For much the past almost twenty years, Herzog has used thousands of metal staples to embed (and then deconstruct) found textiles into various surfaces, including gallery walls, movable panels and mixed media constructions. Her installations are characterized by a mix of rigorous hard work and playful, context-sensitive experimentation.

Herzog lives and works in New York City, and has been featured in numerous solo and two-person exhibits. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Norway, Sweden and Iceland, Canada, Chile, and the Netherlands, and she has participated in numerous group shows at institutions such as the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, The Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and at The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City. She has been awarded residencies at the Albers Foundation, in Bethany, Connecticut, Søndre Green Farm in Noresund, Norway.Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Australia, the Farpath Foundation in Dijon, France, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, LMCC Workspace and Dieu Donne Paper in New York. Her honors include the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, the Lillian Elliot Award, the Lambent Fund Fellowship, and the Joan Mitchell Award.

Brian Seibert

Brian Seibert, a lecturer in Yale’s Theater Studies Program, is the author of “What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing,” which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The book was hailed by The New York Times as not just a book that illuminates the history of tap dance “as well as anyone ever will” but as “nothing less than a social history of our country’s deepest folk and pop roots.” The book also received accolades in The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, Commentary, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist, which chose it as one of the Best Books of 2015.

Since 2011, Seibert has been a dance critic and features writer for The New York Times, and he has contributed to The New Yorker since 2002. His reviews, features, and essays have appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Dance Magazine, and The Threepenny Review, among other publications. He has been described as “a dance critic known for the penetration and nimble wit of his reviews” and an artost who “writes beautiful prose and is a crackerjack storyteller.” Seibert has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia University, he has taught writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Columbia University, and Yale University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.