CAMBRIDGE, MA.- The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology announced the selection of the 2009 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography. On April 13, 2009, the Gardner Fellowship committee awarded the Fellowship to Alessandra Sanguinetti, an award-winning photographer who divides her time between the United States and Argentina. Sanguinetti will be working on a project entitled “The Life That Came.”

Ten years in the making, “The Life That Came” grows out of an earlier project, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. In 1999, she began photographing two young cousins as they grew up in the remote farmlands outside Buenos Aires. She cultivated a close relationship with the girls over a five-year period, capturing their dreams and desires as their childhood ended, and they became young adults. Sanguinetti writes, “The Pampas is a mythical space rooted in Argentina’s identity, embraced by a society that celebrates men’s accomplishments, yet rarely acknowledges the lives of women… now the girls will enter not only the adult world they once imagined, but a more complex social one as well.” During her fellowship year, Sanguinetti will focus both on the two girls’ individuality and on the wider social networks and context in which they live.

Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, nominated Sanguinetti, writing that “in her more recent work, the girls face psychological and personal challenges as their childhood dreams become the reality of early motherhood and subsistence farming. As in her earlier work, Sanguinetti’s insight lies in her ability to combine everyday experiences with myth.”

Prof. William L. Fash, William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum, says "Alessandra's work has a penetrating yet poetic aspect that is now being recognized broadly across the field of photography. We're very pleased that she'll be building on her previous project in Argentina and documenting the changes her subjects go through as they move from the rural to the urban context there."

Alessandra Sanguinetti has won many awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2000), Hasselblad Foundation grant (2001), Discovery Award from Rencontres D’Arles (2006), MacDowell Fellowship (2007), John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (2008), and a National Geographic Magazine Grant (2009). She is represented in the United States by Yossi Milo Gallery.