Meet the 2016 MacArthur Fellows

Leading advocacy and legal efforts to secure the right to due process for immigrants facing deportation and working to set new precedents for the constitutional rights of noncitizens.

Restoring the linguistic, cultural, and intellectual heritage of the Myaamia (Miami) nation to its present-day descendants through a multipronged approach of research, education, and academic partnerships.

Revealing the power of storytelling and creative expression to engender sustained emotional connections among elders experiencing cognitive impairment.

Creating deceptively intricate, abstract pieces that provoke thoughtful reflection and bring viewers to the threshold between visual perception and objective knowledge of three-dimensional space.

Using a range of theatrical genres in subversive, often unsettling works that engage frankly with the ways in which race, class, and history are negotiated in both private and public.

Introducing the work of critically important, but under-recognized, black artists to the canons of modern and contemporary art through both research and curatorial practice.

Tackling unresolved questions in optimization and approximation and contributing to significant advances in the field of computational complexity.

Exploring the ways in which the arts and popular culture are conduits to cross-cultural exchange and bringing diverse communities in Los Angeles together around heretofore unnoticed cultural commonalities.

Rendering pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day experience in works of nonfiction marked by dynamic interplay between personal experience and critical theory.

Merging methods and approaches from disparate fields to investigate the co-evolution of bacteria and their environments, from the ancient Earth to the human body.

Shedding new light on the biogeochemical processes underlying the cycling of nutrients and energy that shape the Earth’s climate through studies of microbial communities in extreme environments.

Applying principles of soft-condensed matter physics to unravel microscale mysteries of living and nonliving matter and inventing affordable technologies for global education, health, and science explorations.

Developing a model for establishing the creditworthiness of underbanked populations that is affording them a pathway to mainstream financial services and improving their financial stability.

Crafting critical texts for understanding American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century in inventive, ever-evolving forms of poetic expression.

Fusing artwork, written text, and design in a unique approach to visual nonfiction that enriches the ways in which stories can be conveyed, experienced, and understood.

Making arresting, playful, and erudite videos that explore the condition of women throughout history.

Developing point-of-care diagnostic technologies for use in low-resource settings and inspiring the next generation of engineers to translate lessons from the classroom into solutions for global health disparities.

Repositioning beadwork into a potent platform for commentary on social and political injustices.

Bringing to light the stories of people usually invisible to mainstream reporting and providing new and compelling perspectives on even well-covered social justice issues.

Advancing the socioeconomic well-being of low-income communities in the developing world through innovative communication and digital technologies that respond to real-world constraints.

Synthesizing various musical styles in highly physical, large-scale narrative compositions that reimagine folk traditions and lore and address issues of the American worker.

Bringing diverse people and cultures to children’s and young adult literature and confirming comics’ place as an important creative and imaginative force within literature, art, and education.

Pioneering new methods for the catalysis and functionalization of carbon-hydrogen bonds and enabling the development of versatile, novel, and beneficial chemical compounds.