‘Genius’ pays off
NEW YORKERS stood tall in this year’s “genius grants” from the MacArthur Foundation, with five of the 24 winners hailing from New York.
That group, now in an elite club of high achievers, includes playwright Annie Baker, 36, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, 41, theater artist Taylor Mac, 44, landscape architect Kate Orff, 45, artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, 43, and immunologist Gabriel Victora, 40.
Each new MacArthur Fellow has been awarded the prize, the foundation said, for bringing “their exceptional creativity to diverse people, places and social challenges. Their work gives us reason for optimism and inspires us all.”
Each winner receives a nostrings-attached $625,000 stipend that’s paid in quarterly installments over five years.
And each was singled out by the foundation for individual contributions to art, culture and science.
Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for her play “The Flick,” mines “the minutiae of how we speak, act and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.” Hannah-Jones chronicles “the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform.”
Mac engages “audiences as active participants in works that dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community.” Orff designs “adaptive and resilient urban habitats and encouraging residents to be active stewards of the ecological systems underlying our built environment.”
Paglen documents “the hidden operations of covert government projects and examining the ways that human rights are threatened in an era of mass surveillance.”
Victora investigates “acquired, or adaptive, immunity and the mechanisms by which organisms’ antibody-based responses to infection are fine-tuned.”
On Twitter, Orff expressed her reaction — and there’s little doubt she spoke for all of the winners in New York and beyond: “I am so honored. Thank you.”
Other recipients include writer Jesmyn Ward, who was praised for her raw and powerful depictions of poor African-Americans confronting racial and economic inequalities in the rural South.
“I am deeply humbled and also overjoyed,” she said in a video from Tulane University, where she’s a professor.
A complete list of winners can be found on the MacArthur Foundation website, macfound.org.