Anna Deavere Smith
Through profound performances and plays that blend theater and journalism, she has informed our understanding of social issues and conveyed a range of disparate characters.
Tag Archives: MacArthur Genius Winner
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Lynda Barry
Barry invented the term “autobiofictionalography” to describe the hybrid nature of her multilayered, multimedia approach that incorporates collage and drawing in ink and watercolor.
Karen Dorn Steele
Karen Dorn Steele is an environmental journalist best known for breaking the story of nuclear experiments causing potential public health damage at the Hanford Nuclear Site.
Muriel Snowden
Co-founded Freedom House, Inc., a Boston nonprofit community-based organization dedicated to human rights and advocacy for African-Americans in Boston. Her leadership moved Freedom House into areas of urban renewal, minority employment, and educational equality for children as well as being a positive force for interracial cooperation
Elma Lewis
Founded the National Center for Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) in 1968 eighteen years after opening the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts (ELSFA) in Boston
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.
Nanfu Wang
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).