Meet The Worlds New Geniuses

29 Sep, 2015

A journalist whose work focuses on race and racism in the United States and a New York City tap dancer and choreographer are among the 24 winners of $625,000 genius grants, the U.S. organization awarding them said on Monday.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation annually makes the awards as “seed money for intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors,” according to the organization. The grants are paid out over five years.

This year’s winners include Ta-Nehisi Coates, 39, whose journalism for the Atlantic and book “Between the World and Me” have provided context to a national debate on racism and police violence raging in response to numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed black people over the last year.

“These 24 delightfully diverse MacArthur Fellows are shedding light and making progress on critical issues, pushing the boundaries of their fields, and improving our world in imaginative, unexpected ways,” MacArthur President Julia Stasch said in a statement.

The group, which began its program in 1981 to provide money to help fund the specialized work of ambitious free-thinkers, uses anonymous nominators and selection committees to decide who gets the grants.

2015 winners are:

* Michelle Dorrance, 36, who founded and is the artistic director of Dorrance Dance in New York City. The foundation called her a “a tap dancer and choreographer breathing new life into a uniquely American art form.”

* Basil Twist, 46, a puppetry artist and director in New York City whose theatrical works “explore the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the abstract and the figurative.”

* Peidong Yang, 44, whose work on inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, is “transforming the field of semiconductor nanowires and nanowire photonics and enabling wide-ranging practical applications.”

* Patrick Awuah, Education Entrepreneur creating a new model for higher education in Africa that combines training in ethical leadership, a liberal arts tradition, and skills for contemporary African needs and opportunities.

* Kartik Chandran, Environmental Engineer transforming wastewater from a pollutant requiring disposal to a resource for useful products, such as commodity chemicals, energy sources, and fertilizers.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates, Journalist interpreting complex and challenging issues around race and racism through the lens of personal experience and nuanced historical analysis.

* Gary Cohen, Environmental Health Advocate spurring environmental responsibility among health care providers and repositioning health care institutional practice around the broader challenges of sustainability, climate change, and community health.

* Matthew Desmond, Urban Sociologist revealing the impact of eviction on poor families and the role of housing policy in sustaining poverty and racial inequality in large American cities.

* William Dichtel, Chemist pioneering the assembly of molecules into stable, high surface-area networks with potential applications in electronic, optical, and energy storage devices.

* Nicole Eisenman, Painter expanding the expressive potential of the figurative tradition in works that engage contemporary social issues and restore cultural significance to the representation of the human form.

* LaToya Ruby Frazier, Photographer and Video Artist capturing the consequences of postindustrial decline for marginalized communities and illustrating how photography can promote dialogue about historical change and social responsibility.

* Ben Lerner, Writer transcending conventional distinctions of genre and style in works that convey the texture of our contemporary moment and explore the relevance of art and the artist in modern culture.

* Mimi Lien, Set Designer translating a text’s narrative and emotional dynamics onto the stage in bold, immersive sets that enhance the performance experience for theater makers and viewers alike.

* Lin-Manuel Miranda, Playwright, Composer, and Performer expanding the conventions of musical theater with a popular culture sensibility and musical styles and voices that reflect the diverse cultural panorama of the American urban experience.

* Dimitri Nakassis, Classicist challenging long-held assumptions about modes of economic exchange and political authority in prehistoric Greek societies and revealing their connections to the origins of modern civilization.

* John Novembre, Computational Biologist shedding new light on the links between geography and genomic diversity and producing a more finely grained picture of human evolutionary history.

* Christopher Ré, Computer Scientist democratizing big data analytics through open source data-processing products that have the power of machine learning algorithms but can be integrated into existing and applied database systems

*Marina Rustow, Historian mining textual materials from the Cairo Geniza to deepen our understanding of medieval Muslim and Jewish communities.

* Juan Salgado, Community Leader creating a model for workforce development and training among immigrant communities through a holistic approach that addresses language skills, education, and other barriers to entering the workforce

* Beth Stevens, Neuroscientist revealing the heretofore unknown role of microglial cells in neuron communication and prompting a fundamental shift in thinking about brain development in both healthy and unhealthy states.

* Lorenz Studer, Stem Cell Biologist pioneering a new method for large-scale generation of dopaminergic neurons that could provide one of the first treatments for Parkinson’s disease and prove the broader feasibility of stem cell–based therapies for other neurological disorders.

* Alex Truesdell, Adaptive Designer and Fabricator constructing low-tech, affordable, and customized tools and furniture that enable children with disabilities to participate actively in their homes, schools, and communities.

* Ellen Bryant Voigt, Poet meditating on will and fate and the life cycles of the natural world through a distinctive intermingling of lyric and narrative modes and ongoing experimentation with form and technique.

* Heidi Williams, Economist unraveling the forces that hinder or spur medical innovation through empirically based studies that are informing public policy.

Reuters/MacFound.org

Image MacFound.org

Mentioned In This Post: