MacArthur Genius Winner Archives

Mary Jackson

A descendent of the Gullah community of coastal South Carolina, Mary Jackson learned the art of making baskets at the age of four from her mother and grandmother.

No historian has done more to recover the stories of enslaved African-Americans than Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as wide acclaim.

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.

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.