MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipients include a hula master and poet—all of whom get $800,000 to spend on anything they want

MacArthur fellows receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. Fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and communities through an often yearslong process that the foundation oversees. They do not apply and are never officially interviewed for the fellowship before it’s awarded.

Each year, the foundation calls the new class of fellows in advance of the public announcement and fellows described being shocked and stunned by the news after receiving a call from an unknown number, which they had sometimes initially ignored.

Ada Limón, who recently began her second term as the country’s poet laureate, said she first missed a call the day after her grandmother, Allamay Barker, had died at the age of 98. It wasn’t until the foundation emailed her that she called back. She said she wept when she heard the news.

“I felt like losing the matriarch of my family and then receiving this, it felt like it was a gift from her in some ways,” she said, speaking from her home in Lexington, Kentucky.

Limón will be reading poetry to an audience at the University of Montevallo, a public university in Alabama, and speaking to a creative writing class in the hours after this year’s class of MacArthur fellows are announced.

As poet laureate, she commissioned an anthology of poems “ You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ” to be published in April and also arranged for historic poems to be installed at seven national parks. NASA is planning to send a poem Limón wrote for an upcoming mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa as part of a time capsule. The poem will be engraved on the spacecraft.

“One of the things that feels most emotional and remarkable to me is that this recognition is coming from within the poetry community,” Limón said.

The foundation has run the fellowship since 1981 and selected more than 1,030 recipients. The awards are given to individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website, and the grants are not tied to a specific project or institution. Many past fellows like Octavia Butler, Paul Farmer and Twyla Tharp are luminaries in their fields and Marlies Carruth, who directs the MacArthur Fellows program, emphasized that they hope fellows will support and inspire each other. The foundation also hosts events for current and past recipients.

“The prize is financial, but it’s also access and being part of a community of extraordinary thinkers and doers,” said Carruth. Last year, the foundation raised the award amount from $625,000 to $800,000. The foundation previously increased the award amount a decade ago from $500,000 to $625,000.

The 2023 class of fellows includes Andrea Armstrong, professor at Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law, who created a database of everyone in Louisiana who has died in prison or jail since 2015; Patrick Makuakāne, a master teacher of hula who is dedicated to preserving Hawaiian cultural heritage; and National Book Award winner Imani Perry, who has authored multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.

Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer, was in her office when an unknown number called her cellphone, which she did not answer. When the same number called her office line, she picked up with some skepticism, Marr said.

“To think that I’ve actually been selected as one is really mind-blowing,” she said, of the MacArthur fellows.

Before the pandemic, Marr, who is a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, studied questions about how viruses moved through the air and how much transmission happens by people breathing in the virus versus from contaminated objects.

Her expertise became extremely relevant after the outbreak of COVID-19 when she argued that airborne transmission was likely a major way the virus was spreading. She said she hopes this recognition of her work will help her gain access to data to better understand the seasonality of the flu.

Ian Bassin is the co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that helped to shape legislation passed in December 2022 to overhaul the Electoral Count Act. The changes clarify parts of the 1887 law to make it harder for future presidents to seek to prevent the transfer of power.

When he received the call from MacArthur, Bassin was standing in his kitchen and said his mind immediately went to his late grandparents, with whom he wished he could share the news. He said he sees himself as just one of a multitude of organizations and people working to create a more inclusive and resilient democratic system.

“This fellowship feels both like a tremendous opportunity, but also a responsibility because the work of protecting and perfecting our democracy is far from complete,” Bassin said. “And so this just underscores for me the obligation I think I now have to do my part in finishing that work.”

The 2023 fellows are:

E. Tendayi Achiume, 41, Los Angeles, a legal scholar who examines the history of global migration to argue for a reimagining of the rules governing the movement of people.

Andrea Armstrong, 48, New Orleans, a legal scholar who focuses on incarceration and created a methodology for documenting the deaths of people who die in prison or jail.

Rina Foygel Barber, 40, Chicago, a statistician who has developed tools to test the accuracy of predictions made by machine learning on large and complex datasets.

Ian Bassin, 47, Washington, a lawyer and advocate for democracy who helped design changes to federal election laws that Congress eventually passed.

Courtney Bryan, 41, New Orleans, a composer and pianist who draws on jazz, classical and sacred music as well as recordings of contemporary voices to create works in a range of formats that center the experiences of African Americans.

Jason D. Buenrostro, 35, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a cellular and molecular biologist who developed new methods and tools to better understand how and when genes are expressed.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, 64, Nashville, Tennessee, a multidisciplinary artist originally from Cuba who works across mediums exploring motherhood, migration, memory and the slave trade as well as teaching and supporting the work of other artists.

Raven Chacon, 45, Red Hook, New York, a composer and artist whose performances and visual art question and reveal the histories and legacies of European colonization of the United States.

Diana Greene Foster, 52, San Francisco, a demographer and reproductive health researcher who has helped build a body of research about the impact that having or being denied access to contraception and abortion care has on the lives of women.

Lucy Hutyra, 47, Boston, an environmental ecologist whose research into how, when and why carbon moves through urban landscapes has helped cities improve climate mitigation strategies.

Carolyn Lazard, 36, Philadelphia, an artist whose videos, installations and performances explore disability, health and medicine including through the use of accessibility practices.

Ada Limón, 47, Lexington, Kentucky, a poet whose work often draws from the wonder of the natural world and who has worked to bring poetry to new audiences.

Lester Mackey, 38, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a computer scientist and statistician whose research has helped improve the efficiency and predictions of machine learning techniques.

Patrick Makuakāne, 62, San Francisco, a master teacher of hula and cultural preservationist whose choreography and dance have blended hula with contemporary influences while uplifting Hawaiian languages and histories.

Linsey Marr, 48, Blacksburg, Virginia, an environmental engineer who studies air quality and how viruses are transmitted through the air to inform and improve public health guidance.

Manuel Muñoz, 51, Tucson, Arizona, a fiction writer whose stories are rooted in the multifaceted experiences of the Mexican American community in California’s Central Valley.

Imani Perry, 51, Cambridge, Massachusetts, an interdisciplinary scholar and writer who has authored multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.

Dyani White Hawk, 46, Shakopee, Minneapolis, a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, embroidered canvases, photographs and videos uplift and draw connections between Indigenous art practices and aesthetics and contemporary and modern art.

A. Park Williams, 42, Los Angeles, a hydroclimatologist whose research has uncovered new insights into the impact of climate change on wildfires, drought and forest growth.

Amber Wutich, 45, Tempe, Arizona, an anthropologist who has contributed to building a body of research to understand the impact of water scarcity on communities and how those communities cope or respond.