Meet the 7 Black scholars and artists named among the MacArthur ‘Genius’ fellows class of 2023

The grant recipients each receive $800,000 to spend in a way they see fit.

On Wednesday, the MacArthur Foundation announced this year’s class of “Genius” fellows, and among the 20 grantees are seven Black scholars, artists, and musicians. This year’s 20 recipients span various disciplines and focus, including law, art, environmental studies, literature, poetry, anthropology, and more. 

MacArthur fellows, who do not apply, are nominated and endorsed by their peers and picked on a somewhat mysterious basis of merits. Each fellow receives $800,000 over five years to spend however they see fit. 

Since the grant began in 1981, 1,131 fellows have been named, including the writer and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, the artist Kara Walker, the writer Kiese Laymon, poet Claudia Rankine, and more. 

This year’s Black recipients include a computer scientist, a pianist, a law scholar, a writer, and more. Meet all seven below. 

E. Tendayi Achiume

Based in Los Angeles, Achiume is a legal scholar focusing on immigration, human rights, human security, and legal studies. Through her work, she aims to reframe traditional mindsets around international law as it intersects with racial justice and global migration. 

“I’m interested in rethinking that can take us to more creative and just ways of living together,” she said in a video for the MacArthur Foundation. 

Andrea Armstrong

As an incarnation law scholar based in New Orleans, Armstrong has been illuminating U.S. incarceration practices, including the poor living conditions in prisons and jails and deaths behind bars. Armstrong launched the Incarceration Transparency project to help further provide much-needed transparency and offer a place for memorials for those who lost their lives while incarcerated. While her work mainly focuses on Louisiana, the impact reaches beyond. 

“People are so much more than their worst moment. They are caretakers, they are artists, they are musicians, they are brothers and sisters, and uncles and aunts. And all of that goes missing when somebody dies behind bars,” Armstrong said in an interview for MacArthur. 

Courtney Bryan

Bryan is a celebrated composer and pianist based in New Orleans who famously composed the orchestra piece “Sanctum” amid the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015. She said she was inspired by several instances of high-profile police brutality, including the beating of Marlene Pinnock and the death of Mike Brown, when composing the piece. Her music has roots in the Black church and combines jazz with classical elements.  

“Music is my way of expressing myself and understanding the world,” she said during an interview for MacArthur. “It’s also an extension of me expressing my spirituality to really reflect on issues that have happened historically and issues that are happening today that are very important to me.” 

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Through her multidisciplinary art, Campos-Pons explores various themes, including memory, spirituality, identity, and her own Afro-Cuban heritage. Based in Tennessee, she works in many mediums, such as photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, video, multimedia installations, and more.  

“I want to present the complexity of duality, knowledge, history, heritage, culture, and a play for justice, Campos-Pons said in a MacArthur interview.  

Lester Mackey

Mackey, a computer scientist and statistician based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializes in machine learning. His work focuses on establishing solutions for real life through developing “learning algorithms” based on data science. Fields his work has benefitted include environmental, health, and more. 

“I have found that if you want to solve a problem well, you have to develop some new tools and some new theory. And those tools and theory will extend well beyond the original scope of the original problem,” Mackey said in an interview with the MacArthur Foundation.

Imani Perry

Perry, a scholar and a writer, is bringing a new context to African-American life where race, gender, and politics are concerned. Her work on historical and contemporary life spans genres and disciplines, including history and biography. Some of her works include “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation,” “Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation,” and “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.”

Of her work, Perry told the MacArthur Foundation, “I’m always trying to write in a way that pushes us towards a deeper both recognition of others and reckoning with our history.”  

Celebrating the honor in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Perry wrote, “Feeling certain that it was divine intervention that would put me in Alabama (for a few hours) on this special day. How could I not have my feet planted on my native soil?”

In another post she wrote, “Grateful.”

Carolyn Lazard

The conceptualist Philadelphia-based artist Lazard’s work spans video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Through minimalist and even the avant-garde, their work often revolves around themes of accessibility and disability. Lazard also draws on their own experience with chronic illness in both their work and writings.  

In an interview with the MacArthur Foundation, Lazard said, “I’m interested in the history of disablement and disability and how we might think through certain kinds of relations of care and dependency, and collectivity.”

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