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- Climate and food systems: research that ties earth science to justice
- Revisiting American history and the roots of inequality
- Memory, justice and art: creators who probe violence and remembrance
- Biomedical breakthroughs and new materials for health
- Language, memory and the art of connection
- Performance, public space and sensory experiment
- Who made the cut: the fellowship’s shape and significance
The MacArthur Foundation has named 20 innovators across arts, science and public life as recipients of its coveted fellowships. Each winner receives a $800,000, no-strings-attached grant to pursue ambitious work. The class spans climate scientists, historians, artists, engineers and storytellers, all chosen for projects that reshape how we understand climate, justice, health and human connection.
Climate and food systems: research that ties earth science to justice
- Holly Jean Buck — A sociologist at the University at Buffalo who examines the ethical and political dimensions of climate interventions. Her writing argues that carbon removal must center communities, not corporate profit.
- Kaiyu Guan — A climate scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign using satellites and machine learning. He builds digital tools to model crop responses to weather, water and land use.
- Marika Holland — Based at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, she studies how shrinking polar sea ice alters global climate. Her work links physical thresholds in ice cover to cascading warming effects.
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Revisiting American history and the roots of inequality
- Elizabeth Ellis — A historian at Princeton who highlights how smaller Indigenous nations shaped early U.S. diplomacy and commerce, shifting the narrative from large confederacies to local agency.
- Ellora Derenoncourt — A labor economist at Princeton whose research connects policy change to racial income shifts. Her studies show how extending wage protections in the 1960s narrowed earnings gaps.
- Ariel Ron — A historian at Southern Methodist University exploring northern agriculture. His work argues that family farms were a potent political and economic force in the 19th century.
Memory, justice and art: creators who probe violence and remembrance
- Maaza Mengiste — A novelist and professor whose fiction interweaves deep historical research with layered perspectives to explore conflict’s human toll. Her narratives recover overlooked actors from war histories.
- Vincent Valdez — A Texas-based visual artist who reinvents classical painting to document Chicano life and displacement. His installation work confronts historical erasure and urban transformation.
- Rodney McMillian — An artist and UCLA professor who uses mixed media to expose systemic inequality. Recent pieces pair imagery and archival text to interrogate discriminatory housing histories.
- Kate Spradley — A forensic anthropologist at Texas State University who leads Operation Identification. Her team combines forensic methods and DNA to identify migrants found at the border and return remains to families.
Biomedical breakthroughs and new materials for health
- Liangfang Zhang — A chemical and biological engineer at UC San Diego pioneering biomimetic nanomedicine. He cloaks nanoparticles with cell membranes to deliver drugs and neutralize toxins stealthily.
- Song Lin — An organic chemist at Stanford advancing electrosynthesis. His methods use electricity, not toxic reagents, to build molecules for medicines and materials.
- Vincenzo Vitelli — A University of Chicago physicist blending topology and biology. His models describe how forces move through tissues, shedding light on growth, healing and disease mechanics.
Language, memory and the art of connection
- Christine Sun Kim — A Berlin-based sound and visual artist who is deaf and reframes sound as visual and tactile. Her charcoal scores merge musical notation with American Sign Language grammar.
- Felipe De Brigard — A philosopher and cognitive scientist at Duke studying memory’s flexibility. His fieldwork with survivors of political violence helps shape ideas about communal healing.
- Bryan Washington — A novelist living in Tokyo whose intimate stories examine relationships among queer men of color and family dynamics. His quiet scenes often use meals to show repair and care.
- Layli Long Soldier — A poet in Santa Fe who dissects legal language to reveal state violence and erasure. Her work contrasts formal apologies with Indigenous teachings and personal testimony.
Performance, public space and sensory experiment
- Trajal Harrell — A Zürich-based choreographer who blends voguing and postmodern dance. His performances collapse cultural boundaries and reframe movement traditions.
- Chip Thomas — An artist and longtime primary care doctor on the Navajo Nation. He uses public art to critique health disparities and corporate influence, repurposing billboards to spark dialogue.
- Immanuel Wilkins — A New York saxophonist and composer who creates multisensory concerts. He has integrated cooking sounds and live culinary action into musical performances.
Who made the cut: the fellowship’s shape and significance
The MacArthur Fellows program this year spotlights collaboration across fields. Scientists work with communities; artists tackle systemic harm; scholars reframe history. Each recipient received $800,000 to pursue long-term, often experimental projects.
Selection themes and what they reveal for readers
- Interdisciplinarity: Many fellows blend methods from different fields.
- Justice and repair: A notable focus on historical and contemporary harms.
- Practical innovation: From edible stage performances to DNA repatriation efforts.
