MacArthur Genius Winner Archives

Susan Meiselas

Photojournalist who has won awards for her intense images that are as much at home in newspapers and magazines as they are on museum walls.

A 2020 MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant winner, Nanfu Wang uses film to explore the relationship between individuals and governments. Like a rigorous investigative journalist, Wang employs immersive, vivid storytelling and a first-person narrative structure in her documentary films to examine the ideas of responsibility and freedom, particularly in her native China.

Suzan-Lori Parks

One of the most successful playwrights in the United States. The first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2002) and a pioneer of historically conscious and linguistically complex theater, her work is now taught at drama schools across the country.

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Environmental health advocate Catherine Coleman Flowers is determined to battle “America’s Dirty Secret”: unequal sewage and sanitation access for rural communities and people of color. A MacArthur Genius, she works on multiple fronts to improve public health, economic development, and access to water and sanitation amidst the growing threat of climate change.

Ruth Behar

Known as a writer, anthropologist, and professor, Behar is the author of ten books, including Santa Maria del Monte: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village (1986), Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993), and recently Lucky Broken Girl (2018).

Valeria Luiselli

An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection “Sidewalks”; the novels “Faces in the Crowd” and “The Story of My Teeth”; “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” and “Lost Children Archive: A Novel.”

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of close to seventeen books, including Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry) (1999), La cresta de Ilión (The Iliac Crest) (2002), La Muerte me da (Death Hits) (2007), and El mal de la taiga (The Taiga Syndrome) (2012).

Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward is the acclaimed author of the novels “Where the Line Bleeds,” “Salvage the Bones,” winner of the 2011 National Book Award, and “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” winner of the 2017 National Book Award. Her nonfiction work includes the memoir “Men We Reaped,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2020 work “Navigate Your Stars.”

Dr Jennifer Richeson

Social psychologist whose research has illuminated how identities – particularly racial identities – are formed and shaped through interactions with others.

Marian Wright Edelman

Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund and an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life.