From NPR · · 5m
Twenty scholars and artists win MacArthur Fellowships
The MacArthur Foundation awards eight hundred thousand dollars to twenty fellows working across science, history, art and justice.
In brief
The MacArthur Foundation awards eight hundred thousand dollars to twenty fellows working across science, history, art and justice. Twenty scholars and artists have won MacArthur Fellowships worth eight hundred thousand dollars each, selected for work spanning climate science, racial economics, forensic anthropology…
Twenty fellows win no-strings grants
The MacArthur Foundation has awarded eight hundred thousand dollars to twenty scholars and artists. Recipients include a forensic anthropologist who repatriates migrant remains and a saxophonist whose performances include live cooking onstage.
Fellows converge on human connection
Though the winners work across different disciplines, they share interests in human connection and healing. Visual and sound artist Christine Sun Kim, philosopher Felipe De Brigard and novelist Bryan Washington all explore these themes from radically different creative standpoints.
Holly Jean Buck on climate ethics
University of Buffalo sociologist Holly Jean Buck centers on ethical and political questions around climate change policy. In her two thousand nineteen book After Geoengineering, Buck argues that carbon removal systems must serve local communities and public interest rather than corporate profit.
Kaiyu Guan boosts crop productivity
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign climate scientist Kaiyu Guan brings together satellite data and machine learning to boost food productivity while reducing environmental impacts. Guan has created digital platforms that simulate how crops might respond to future weather patterns, water availability and land management practices.
Marika Holland studies polar warming
Based at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, climate scientist Marika Holland works to predict complex interactions between polar sea ice and global climate dynamics. Holland demonstrated that as sea ice thins past critical thresholds, exposed ocean water absorbs more solar radiation, accelerating ice loss and triggering rapid polar warming.
Elizabeth Ellis rewrites Indigenous history
Princeton University historian Elizabeth Ellis studies Indigenous sovereignty and commercial relationships, shifting focus from large Native confederations to reveal how smaller Indigenous groups shaped early American history. Her two thousand twenty-two book The Great Power of Small Nations explores how such groups in the Lower Mississippi Valley interacted with early European settlers.
Ellora Derenoncourt on racial wage gaps
Princeton University labor economist and economic historian Ellora Derenoncourt studies historical drivers of the racial wealth gap in the United States. Her work on the nineteen sixty-six extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act shows that extending minimum wage protections to Black-dominated sectors radically decreased the Black-white earnings gap during the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies.
Ariel Ron challenges farming narratives
Southern Methodist University historian Ariel Ron researches nineteenth century farming practices, challenging narratives about a purely industrial North versus an agrarian, slave-holding South. His two thousand twenty book Grassroots Leviathan demonstrates that Northern family farms were a powerful political and economic force rather than a mere backdrop to industrialization.
Maaza Mengiste explores conflict's harms
Novelist and Wesleyan University English professor Maaza Mengiste blends deep historical research with multiple characters' perspectives to explore individual and societal harms of conflict. Her two thousand nineteen novel The Shadow King focuses on Ethiopian women who took up arms against fascist Italian forces during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, which started in nineteen thirty-five.
Vincent Valdez depicts working-class life
Texas-based visual artist Vincent Valdez, who divides his time between Houston and San Antonio, subverts classical European painting traditions to depict everyday working-class people, particularly from Chicano communities. For the installation El Chavez Ravine, created with musician Ry Cooder, Valdez painted a nineteen fifty-s ice cream truck with scenes of Mexican American displacement in Los Angeles.
Kate Spradley identifies migrant remains
Texas State University forensic anthropologist Kate Spradley works to identify and repatriate the remains of migrants who have perished along the Texas-Mexico border. In two thousand thirteen, Spradley founded Operation Identification, which combines forensic science, cross-border DNA databases and humanitarian partnerships to return remains to family members.
Song Lin pioneers clean drug synthesis
Stanford University organic chemist Song Lin's research has advanced organic electrosynthesis, using clean electricity rather than toxic chemical reagents to craft custom molecules for new drugs and materials like polymers. Lin demonstrates how simple electrical currents, even from a couple of AA batteries, can replace expensive, toxic heavy metals to synthesize complex molecules for medicine.
Christine Sun Kim makes sound visible
Born deaf, Berlin-based sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim uses charcoal drawings, musical notation, performance and video art to reframe sound as a visual and tactile medium. Kim's large-scale charcoal drawings combine musical symbols with American Sign Language grammar to make the nuances of ASL visible to non-signers, building a bridge between linguistic worlds.
Bryan Washington explores queer healing
Tokyo-based novelist Bryan Washington's spare, intimate fiction redefines how modern relationships, especially among queer men of color and their families, are built, strained and repaired. In works like Lot, Memorial and Family Meal, healing often happens at the dinner table in quiet scenes that expose the complex, messy reality of modern relationships alongside moments of beauty and humor.
Immanuel Wilkins transforms concert spaces
Twenty-nine-year-old New York-based saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins is the youngest person on the MacArthur roster this year. He transforms traditional concert venues into multisensory spaces. While performing his Blues Blood album live, he played alongside a chef cooking meals onstage, filling out the musical composition with the sounds of knives chopping, water boiling and oil frying in a pan.
The headline
Twenty scholars and artists have won MacArthur Fellowships worth eight hundred thousand dollars each, selected for work spanning climate science, racial economics, forensic anthropology, art and literature.
