The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 20 winners of the 2023 MacArthur Fellowships, regarded as one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for intellectual and artistic achievement.
The award, commonly known as the “genius grant,” carries an $800,000 stipend. It’s paid in quarterly installments over five years with “no strings attached” on how recipients can spend the money.
The three basic criteria used to select MacArthur fellows are:
- Exceptional creativity;
- Promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments; and
- Potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.
The MacArthur Foundation awards the fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. According to the foundation, the “recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.”
The foundation considers the fellowships to be “an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential,” and it does not require the fellows to submit specific products or reports during the term of the fellowship.
The majority of this year’s winners are people of color, including seven individuals who are Black or African American, five who are Latinos, three who identify as Indigenous or Native American and two who are Asian. Brief biographies of all the fellows can be found here.
Marlies Carruth, Director of the MacArthur Fellows, said in an email statement: “The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities. They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment.”
As in years past, scholars, artists and scientists from higher education are well represented. Roughly two-thirds of the 20 recipients work at an American college or university, and several of them hold endowed chairs or professorships at their institutions.
Included among the new fellows with academic appointments are:
Legal Scholars
- E. Tendayi Achiume, the Alice Miñana Professor of Law at UCLA
- Andrea Armstrong, the Norman C. Francis Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola University (New Orleans)
Scientists and Engineers
- Jason D. Buenrostro, associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University
- Lucy Hutyra, an ecologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Boston University and a visiting scholar at Google
- Linsey Marr, University Distinguished Professor and the Charles P. Lunsford Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech University
Interdisciplinary Scholars
- Imani Perry, the Henry A. Morss, Jr., and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Perry was formerly the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University from 2009 to 2023 and is also the co-founder of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard.
Artists, Musicians and Writers.
- Pianist and composer Courtney Bryan, currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Tulane University;
- María Magdalena Campos-Pons, the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair and Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University, and founder of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice Program
- Manuel Muñoz, a writer of fiction in the Department of English at the University of Arizona
Social Scientists
- A. Park Williams, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at UCLA
- Amber Wutich, President’s Professor of Anthropology and director of the Center for Global Health at Arizona State University
Statisticians and Demographers
- Rina Foygel Barber, the Louis Block Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago
- Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco
Nominees for a MacArthur Fellowship are made by invited external nominators, who are chosen from a broad range of fields and interests. Nominations are evaluated by an independent selection committee, consisting of about a dozen leaders in the arts, sciences, humanities, and for-profit and nonprofit communities. The committee then recommends its selections to the President and Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation. Since 1981, more than 1,100 individuals have been named MacArthur Fellows.