PA MacArthur Fellow Receives $800,000 ‘Genius Grant’

PENNSYLVANIA — A Philadelphia artist is among 20 new recipients of prestigious fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known as “genius grants.”

Each of the new fellows announced Wednesday will receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. The fellows do not apply and are not interviewed before the award is made. Instead, fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and communities through an open, years-long process overseen by the foundation.

Carolyn Lazard, 36, specializes in 3-D visual art. Through the use of everyday objects such as a HEPA air purifier, a noise machine and a power-lifter recliner chair, Lazard’s multidisciplinary work centers on disability and accessibility and calls attention to society’s dependency on care to sustain social life.

In addition to her work as an artist, Lazard writes about her experience with chronic illness and the limitations posed by biomedical understandings of health.

MacArthur Fellows are individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website.

Marlies Carruth, who directs the MacArthur Fellows program, said this year’s fellows “are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities.”

Fellows include a scientist who studies the transmission of diseases, a master hula dancer and cultural preservationist, the sitting U.S. poet laureate, a law professor who created a database of recent Louisiana prison or jail deaths, and a National Book Award winner who has written multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.

“They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment,” Carruth said in an announcement.

One of the goals of the program is for fellows to support and inspire one another.

“The prize is financial, but it’s also access and being part of a community of extraordinary thinkers and doers,” Carruth told The Associated Press.

The MacArthur Foundation has awarded genius grants to 1,030 recipients since 1981. Previous recipients from Pennsylvania include:

• Danielle Bassett, physicist
• Christopher Beard, paleontologist
• Michael Cohen, pharmacist
• Steve Coleman, jazz composer and saxophonist
• Maria Luisa Crawford, geologist and petrologist
• Angela Duckworth, research psychologist
• Nancy Marguerite Farriss, historian
• P. Gabrielle Foreman, literary historian and digital humanist
• Elodie Ghedin, parasitologist/virologist
• Terrance Hayes, poet
• Daniel H. Janzen, ecologist
• Sarah H. Kagan, gerontological nurse
• Stuart Alan Kauffman, evolutionary biologist
• Carolyn Lazard, artist
• Louis Massiah, documentary filmmaker
• D. Holmes Morton, country doctor and research physician
• Lee Ann Newsom, paleoethnobotanist
• John A. Rich, physician
• David Rudovsky, civil rights lawyer
• Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist
• William H. Siemering, journalist and radio producer
• Leo Steinberg, art historian
• Susan Stewart, poet and literary critic
• William E. Strickland Jr., arts educator
• Gary A. Tomlinson, musicologist
• Luis von Ahn, computer scientist
• Heather Williams, biologist and ornithologist
• Emily Wilson, classicist and translator