Meet the 2017 MacArthur Fellows

Visualizing the complexities of globalization and transnational identity in works that layer paint, photographic imagery, prints, and collage elements.

Illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia.

Transforming conditions for low-wage workers with a visionary model of worker-driven social responsibility.

Mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.

Developing machine learning methods that enable computers to process and analyze vast amounts of human language data.

Using an expansive approach to photography that creates new spaces of engagement within cultural institutions, making them more meaningful to and representative of the communities in which they are situated.

Exploring the limits of signal recovery and matrix completion from incomplete data sets with implications for high-impact applications in multiple fields.

Combining ethnographic, forensic, and archaeological evidence to bring to light the human consequences of immigration policy at the U.S.–Mexico border.

Reclaiming African American contributions to folk and country music and bringing to light new connections between music from the past and the present.

Chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform.

Changing public perceptions of immigrant youth and playing a critical role in shaping the debate around immigration policy.

Engaging audiences as active participants in works that dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community.

Confronting the challenges of poverty and disinvestment in urban communities through a Muslim-led civic engagement effort that bridges race, class, and religion.

Challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced.

Designing adaptive and resilient urban habitats and encouraging residents to be active stewards of the ecological systems underlying our built environment.

Documenting the hidden operations of covert government projects and examining the ways that human rights are threatened in an era of mass surveillance.

Unraveling how social networks and norms influence our interactions with one another and identifying interventions that can change destructive behavior.

Reshaping our understanding of African colonialism and nationalism in studies that foreground East African intellectual production.

Creating vivid and witty strategies to design and build places that are more democratic and accountable to their residents.

Identifying and addressing the technological, economic, and social vulnerabilities underlying internet security challenges and cybercrime.

Expanding how opera is performed and experienced through immersive, multisensory, and mobile productions that are infusing a new vitality into the genre.

Assimilating and transforming ideas from a broad spectrum of musical idioms and defying distinctions between genres, composition, and improvisation in a singular expression of contemporary music.

Investigating acquired, or adaptive, immunity and the mechanisms by which organisms’ antibody-based responses to infection are fine-tuned.

Exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential.