This year, in a dazzling tribute to Black excellence, the MacArthur Foundation has honored 12 amazing Black creatives with the foundation's generous and prestigious Fellowship grants, out of 25 awardees overall. This is a record number of simultaneous Black winners for the MacArthur Fellowship since its inception in 1981. Of the 1,014 Fellows honored from 1981 to 2018, whites have accounted for roughly eight of every ten, or 80.4%. Blacks have accounted for 12.5%, Asians 5.9%, and Native Americans 1.2%.
What is the MacArthur Fellowship?
The MacArthur Fellowship is a grant of $625,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years. This no-strings-attached stipend, popularly known as "the genius award," is given to individuals in the arts and sciences who show exceptional talent and creativity; the grant is considered an investment in their potential. The money is intended to give the winners the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional work with no limits on age or field of interest.
How are Fellows chosen?
This program only accepts nominees who are chosen by designated nominators from a broad range of fields and areas of interest. The nominees are required to meet only three criteria to be selected as Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Nominations are then evaluated by a separate selection committee; each individual is considered based on the selection criteria and typically 20 to 30 Fellows are selected each year.
This year's Black MacArthur Fellows
This year's 12 Black MacArthur Fellows all exhibit extraordinary talent, creativity, and a level of genius typical for the recipients of this prestigious award.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a music critic, essayist, and poet from Columbus, OH. He uses the lens of popular music to analyze the broader culture that produces and consumes it. Some of his notable works are They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019), and A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021).
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer from New Haven, CT, who fights for and encourages the rights and humanity of people who are or have been incarcerated. His works include the poetry collection Felon (2019), which he reworked in a collaborative project with the visual artist Titus Kaphar; the resulting art installation was called Redaction (2019). Betts also recently launched the nonprofit Freedom Reads to give incarcerated people access to the power of literature.
Jordan Casteel
Jordan Casteel is a painter from New York who paints her Harlem street surroundings, including the people she meets on the subway, in her classrooms, and in the spaces closest to her.
Ibrahim Cissé
Ibrahim Cissé is a biological physicist from Freiburg, Germany, who is developing single-molecule super-resolution microscopic imaging and applying it to the investigation of subcellular processes in live cells.
Nicole Fleetwood
Nicole Fleetwood is an art historian and curator from New York. She explores how the art of incarcerated people is essential to community understanding of contemporary art, the carceral state, and the humanity it contains.
Ibram X. Kendi
Ibram X. Kendi is an American historian and writer from Boston. He uses his in-depth understanding of racist ideology to present a framework for building a more equitable society. His works include The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965—1972 (2012), Stamped from the Beginning (2016), and How to Be an Antiracist (2019).
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Daniel Lind-Ramos is a sculptor and painter from Loíza, PR, who transforms everyday objects into sculptural collections that personify the social history, religious rituals, and environments of his Afro—Puerto Rican community.
Desmond Meade
Desmond Meade is a civil rights activist from Orlando, FL, working to change disenfranchisement laws and other barriers preventing formerly incarcerated citizens from fully participating in civic life. He is also executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
Safiya Noble
Safiya Noble is an internet studies and digital media scholar with the UCLA departments of Gender Studies and African American Studies. Her book Algorithms of Oppression: How�Search Engines Reinforce Racism�(2018) shows how search engines are not a source of unbiased information, and can actually further racist and sexist stereotypes.
Jacqueline Stewart
Jacqueline Stewart is a film scholar, archivist, and curator from Los Angeles who is shedding light on the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have made to the development of cinema. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (2005) is her landmark study, and she also co-edited L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015). She is chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a historian and writer from Princeton, NJ, where she is currently a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She makes influential critiques of the political and economic forces underlying racial inequality in her books From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) and Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership (2019).
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is a prolific choreographer and dance entrepreneur from Tallahassee, FL, with a style of dance-making and artistic leadership that links dance to cultural identity, civic engagement, community organizing, and imperatives of social justice. Zollar's choreographic works include Shelter (1989), Batty Moves (1995), Visible (2011), Walking with 'Trane (2015) and SCAT! (2018). Zollar is also the founder and visioning partner of the performance ensemble Urban Bush Women.
When one considers the trials and tribulations Blacks have experienced globally, it is encouraging and empowering to see this display of appreciation for Black excellence. This honoring of a diverse group of creatives means just as much to the onlookers—including other Black artists and scientists who see affirmation that their own talent can be recognized one day—as it does to the people being honored.