MacArthur Genius Winner Archives - Page 3 of 4

Julia Bowman Robinson

Julia B Robinson worked on computability, decision problems and non-standard models of arithmetic.

Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgium mathematician and physicist who has done important work on wavelets in image compression. She is on the Board of Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education, an organisation which helps women get advanced degrees in mathematics.

Karen Uhlenbeck

Karen Uhlenbeck is an American mathematician who is a leading expert on partial differential equations.

Lene Hau

Lene Hau is a Danish physicist and mathematician. She has led a team at Harvard University who have slowed light and in 2001 succeeded in stopping a beam of light. This has important applications to quantum computing.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros has won multiple awards, fellowships, and honors as an internationally recognized writer. On September 22, 2016, President Barack Obama presented Cisneros with the National Medal of Arts for her work. Her book called The House on Mango Street, has sold over six million copies and has been translated into over twenty languages.

Julie Mehretu

Whilst Mehretu’s art is inspired by events taking place in Africa and the Middle East, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. According to the artist, her work is not all about “blackness” or “otherness.” She believes that there is a failure to “simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large, abstract paintings” and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman epitomizes the 1980s technique of “image-scavengering,” and “appropriation” by artists seeking to question the so-called truth potential of mass imagery and its seductive hold on our individual and collective psyches.

Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray’s experiments with the shaped canvas were unparalleled, taking what other artists had begun to play with to its apotheosis. Her use of rich but oftentimes discordant color, the massive size and complexity of the canvas(es), and the interweaving of the cartoonish, the disturbing, and the playful influenced her peers and artists in the proceeding decades.

Kara Walker

Walker always insisted that her job was to jolt viewers out of their comfort zone, and even make them angry, once remarking “I make art for anyone who’s forgot what it feels like to put up a fight.” In 2007, TIME magazine featured Walker on its list of the 100 most influential Americans. In 2008 when the artist was still in her thirties, The Whitney held a retrospective of Walker’s work. Though Walker herself is still in mid-career, her illustrious example has emboldened a generation of slightly younger artists to investigate the persistence and complexity of racial stereotyping.

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Butler was a pioneering writer of science fiction. As one of the first African American and female science fiction writers, Butler wrote novels that concerned themes of injustice towards African Americans, global warming, women’s rights, and political disparity. Her books are now taught in schools and universities across the U.S.