Overflowing with Black excellence!
The 2024 MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and there is no shortage of Black excellence! The grant aims to spotlight “extraordinarily creative individuals” who are known for excellence in their sector and offers funding for those whose work will greatly benefit society at large.
Known as the “genius grant,” the $800,000 no-strings-attached award is given to these individuals as an investment in their potential. The fellowship is among the most prestigious honors that can be bestowed in the United States. Fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and selected by a group of anonymous invited evaluators and selectors. The fellows are chosen based on “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.”
Since its inception in 1981, there have been 1,153 MacArthur fellows. This year’s grantees include 22 fellows, with Black Fellows spanning various sectors, from literature to history and choreography.
“The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose. They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth. Their work highlights our shared humanity, centering the agency of disabled people, the humor and histories of Indigenous communities, the emotional lives of adolescents, and perspectives of rural Americans,” said Marlies Carruth, the Director of the MacArthur Fellows Program.
Learn more about the 2024 MacArthur Fellows below.
Ruha Benjamin, 46 | Transdisciplinary Scholar and Writer | Princeton, New Jersey
“Ruha Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer illuminating how advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices.”
Jericho Brown, 48 | Poet | Atlanta, Georgia
“Jericho Brown is a poet reflecting on contemporary culture and identity in works that combine formal experimentation and intense self-examination. He reimagines well-known poetic forms and rhythmic structures in ways that heighten a poem’s emotional charge. Across three collections, Brown explores themes of masculinity, spirituality, family, sexuality, and racial identity from a personal perspective as well as from feelings inspired by pop culture and contemporary America.”
Tony Cokes, 68 | Media Artist | Providence, Rhode Island
“Tony Cokes is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks. Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.”
Jennifer L. Morgan, 58 | Historian | New York, New York
“Jennifer L. Morgan is a historian deepening understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America. Using a range of archival materials—and what is missing from them—Morgan brings to light enslaved African women’s experiences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She shows that exploitation of enslaved women was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world.”
Ebony G. Patterson, 43 | Multimedia Artist | Chicago, Illinois/Kingston, Jamaica
“Ebony G. Patterson is a multimedia artist creating intricate, densely layered, and visually dazzling works that center the culture and aesthetics of postcolonial spaces. Patterson’s practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Across media, her works address themes of postcolonial space, visibility and invisibility, regeneration and mourning.”
Shamel Pitts, 39 | Dancer and Choreographer | Brooklyn, New York
“Shamel Pitts is a choreographer and dancer developing multidisciplinary, performance-based works centered on collaboration and imagining new ways of being in the world. Pitts is the founder and artistic director of TRIBE, a group of artists working in a wide range of media, including lighting design, video-mapping projection technologies, electronic music composition, cinematography, and video art. TRIBE’s works emerge from the collective artistic vision of its members. Pitts brings his unique choreographic style to bear on the groups’ commitment to envisioning a future free from the constraints of historical oppression, particularly for the African diaspora.”
Jason Reynolds, 40 | Children’s and Young Adult Writer | Washington, District of Columbia
“Jason Reynolds is a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose books reflect the rich inner lives of kids of color and offer profound moments of human connection. He writes to fill a void he experienced as a young Black boy from Oxon Hill, Maryland, who seldom saw communities like his depicted in the books he was encouraged to read at school. With a poet’s ear for rhythm and a storyteller’s sense of narrative pacing and structure, Reynolds weaves humor, joy, and playfulness into his works. At the same time, he does not shy away from depicting the challenging realities of racism, economic inequity, police brutality, and grief for his young readers. The characters featured in his fiction forge friendships, discover talents, act out, seek forgiveness, face fears, and care for parents with cancer.”
Dorothy Roberts, 68 | Legal Scholar and Public Policy Researcher | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
“Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.”
Congratulations to the 2024 MacArthur Grant Fellows!
Cover photo: Meet the 2024 Black MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Fellows/ (l to r) Jason Reynolds, Ebony G. Patterson, Jericho Brown/Photo Credit: MacArthur Fellows