MacArthur Foundation announces 2023 genius grant winners

July 28, 2024

Ian Bassin would rather talk about the 2024 election — “one of the most consequential” in the history of this nation — but right now he must talk a little bit about himself. His grandparents used to tell him, repeatedly: “Just try to make something worthwhile of yourself.”

Standing in his kitchen a few weeks ago, with the MacArthur Foundation on the other end of the phone, Bassin wished he could tell his grandparents the news.

The 47-year-old had won a big prize: a “genius grant” fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, recognizing his work with Protect Democracy, an organization he co-founded in 2016 to help strengthen American democracy and combat authoritarianism.

This year’s class of 20 fellows — whittled down from thousands of nominees, some over a period of years, and publicly announced Wednesday — includes artists, scientists, legal scholars and activists. They fight climate change, examine gene expression and create music. They write novels and study machine learning.

And over the next five years, they will each receive $800,000, in quarterly installments, to use as they see fit.

The 2016 presidential election made clear to Bassin that “we were living through a global democratic recession,” he says. Protect Democracy was his response. The organization’s software VoteShield is designed to fight election fraud. Its National Task Force on Election Crises prepares for unprecedented election catastrophes. Its Law for Truth project files defamation lawsuits to help people harmed by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The grants, given every year since 1981, can produce a complicated mix of feelings: honor at the recognition, shock at the money, reflection over the reasons for their work. In California’s East Bay area, Diana Greene Foster snuck away from her college-age children and their friends to return the foundation’s phone call. She is a demographer who studies abortion — specifically the adverse affects of not receiving a desired one, which is more common now in a post-Roe v. Wade era.

“It’s a mix of being happy that I was able to do research that useful and sad that we’re at a point where we’re having this conversation,” says Foster, 52, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco. As states decide whether to pass their own abortion bans, Foster wants the recognition to shine light on her findings — including that those who are denied abortions are more likely to be unemployed and live under the poverty line.

“My hope is they will take the scientific evidence and not just vote on this on the basis of politics,” she says. On a broader level, she hopes it will show “that it’s possible to do good research, even on controversial topics.”

Sharp. Witty. Thoughtful. Sign up for the Style Memo newsletter.

The fellows are 12 women, seven men and one nonbinary individual. They hail from across the country, from Arizona to New York; four live in the Boston area and two each live in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans.

New MacArthur fellow Lucy Hutyra, 47, created Right Place, Right Tree—Boston, an app that helps city planners know where to plant tree canopies to help combat carbon emissions. Hutyra is an environmental ecologist who studies the effects of urbanization.

At 35 years old, Jason D. Buenrostro, a Harvard cellular and molecular biologist, is the year’s youngest fellow. He developed DNA sequencing methods that can, among other things, help researchers understand how cancer cells evolve — which may lead to more effective treatments.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, the oldest fellow at 64, is a multidisciplinary artist serving as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. Born in Cuba, she explores personal and collective histories across Caribbean nations through sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance.

Civilization might be struggling to preserve both democracy and the environment, but Marlies Carruth, director of MacArthur Fellows, calls the “kaleidoscope” of talent and passion “an invitation to be hopeful.”

Share this articleShare

Some of that hope can be found in Patrick Makuakane, who has devoted his life to preserving and promoting the dance art of hula. The 62-year-old, Honolulu-born kumu hula (or master teacher) started Na Lei Hulu i ka Wekiu, a San Francisco-based dance company, in 1985. Receiving the honor as his home state heals from this year’s deadly wildfires — and as his company is still recovering from the pandemic — couldn’t be better timed.

“I think of this award as an award for hula, because a lot of people have no idea what it is,” Makuakane says. “They think it’s a simple-minded dance done in a grass skirt. But it has really profound effects on many people I know. For many of us, hula is life.”

The new fellows were cold-called in late August and early September, and allowed to tell only one person before Wednesday’s official announcement.

“It’s one of the horrible things,” Makuakane jokes. “They give you this fantastic award, and you can’t tell anybody but one person for like three weeks. I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ It’s hard!”

Makuakane, though, is lucky he got the call at all. “I was in Burning Man stuck in the mud and muck, and there’s no cell service,” he says. Somehow, a text finally snuck in, and he spent the next couple of days trying to reach the foundation.

Makuakane is one of eight artists in this year’s class, which also includes Ada Limón, 47, a prolific poet in Lexington, Ky., who focuses on grief and wonder, and Tucson-based author and University of Arizona professor Manuel Muñoz, 51, who writes fiction about the Mexican American communities in California’s Central Valley.

Courtney Bryan, 41, a composer and pianist who teaches at Tulane University, blends various genres such as jazz, classical, opera, spirituals and gospel in pieces that reflect on the African American experience. Her 2015 piece “Sanctum” reacts to police brutality and incorporates recordings of chants from the Ferguson, Mo. protests and part of an interview with Marlene Pinnock, a Black woman who was beaten in Los Angeles by a California Highway Patrol officer.

Bryan’s famed phone call actually came as an email, because her cell automatically forwards numbers she doesn’t know to voice mail. When she finally spoke to the foundation, she was under the impression they wanted her to weigh in on another candidate.

She was the candidate — though if you overheard her, you might think she was talking to a telemarketer.

“When I’m shocked about something, I’m not very expressive. I was kind of very monotone until the end of our conversation,” Bryan says. “The part that got me emotional was thinking about what it would mean to my family and my community. Then I felt the heaviness, in a good way.”

Though she’s on vacation in Rome as the world learns the news, her thoughts are in her native New Orleans — and how she can use the stipend to help the artists of her hometown.

“What I want to do with it is give back,” she says.

The 2023 MacArthur fellows:

E. Tendayi Achiume, 41, legal scholar
Andrea Armstrong, 48, incarceration law scholar
Rina Foygel Barber, 40, statistician
Ian Bassin, 47, lawyer and democracy advocate
Courtney Bryan, 41, composer and pianist
Jason D. Buenrostro, 35, cellular and molecular biologist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, 64, multidisciplinary artist
Raven Chacon, 45, composer and artist
Diana Greene Foster, 52, demographer and reproductive health researcher
Lucy Hutyra, 47, environmental ecologist
Carolyn Lazard, 36, artist
Ada Limón, 47, poet
Lester Mackey, 38, computer scientist and statistician
Patrick Makuakane, 62, kumu hula and cultural preservationist
Linsey Marr, 48, environmental engineer
Manuel Muñoz, 51, fiction writer
Imani Perry, 51, interdisciplinary scholar and writer
Dyani White Hawk, 46, multidisciplinary artist
A. Park Williams, 42, hydroclimatologist
Amber Wutich, 45, anthropologist

correction

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the organization that Ian Bassin co-founded. It is Protect Democracy. The article has been updated.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMC1xcueZqieXZ67tbHRnqqtZ2Jlf3R7kGlmaWxfoq6krdGtn66qXZyyr7XUrGSgqpGjwW5%2Bj2tqaA%3D%3D