Meet the 20 scholars and artists who've just won MacArthur Fellowships
The MacArthur Foundation has announced its 2025 class of 20 fellows, awarding each recipient an $800,000 no-strings-attached grant. The winners represent diverse fields including climate science, sociology, and the arts, with a shared focus on social impact and innovation.
Why it matters
These fellowships provide significant financial support to individuals working on critical societal challenges, often accelerating breakthroughs in science and culture.
A historian who studies racial wage gaps, a saxophonist whose live performances include a chef cooking meals onstage and a forensic anthropologist who repatriates the remains of migrants who perished along the Texas-Mexico border — they are all among the latest recipients of the MacArthur Foundation's no-strings-attached, $800,000 fellowship grants .
As usual, this year's winners come from a wide range of professional disciplines. But they converge in their interests in sometimes unexpected ways. For example, visual and sound artist Christine Sun Kim, philosopher and cognitive scientist Felipe De Brigard and novelist Bryan Washington all explore human connection and healing — from radically different creative standpoints.
Here are the 20 individuals whom the foundation's network of scouts selected as recipients of the prestigious fellowships, popularly known as "genius grants."
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