The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced its 2023 class of MacArthur Fellows.

Twenty fellows working in fields ranging from anthropology, creative writing, and environmental ecology to law, molecular biology, and music will each receive $800,000 over five years. Commonly referred to as the “genius grants,” the awards come without stipulations or reporting requirements and provide fellows with maximum freedom to follow their unique creative vision.

This year’s recipients include Andrea Armstrong, an incarceration law scholar bringing transparency to U.S. incarceration practices and shedding light on the poor living conditions in prisons and jails; demographer and reproductive health researcher Diana Greene Foster, who is investigating how reproductive healthcare policies and access impact individuals’ physical, mental, and socioeconomic well-being; poet Ada Limón, whose work counterbalances grief with wonder in ways that heighten awareness of the natural world and our connections to one another; Lester Mackey, a computer scientist and statistician advancing solutions to data science problems with practical applications; Manuel Muñoz, a fiction writer whose work vividly depicts the multifaceted lives of Mexican American communities in California’s Central Valley; interdisciplinary scholar and writer Imani Perry, whose work provides fresh context to history and the cultural expressions forged by Black Americans in the face of injustice; Dyani White Hawk, a multidisciplinary artist who is illuminating the enduring strength, presence, and influence of Indigenous artistic practices within modern and contemporary art; and A. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist studying the impacts of climate on terrestrial water systems.

“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,” said MacArthur Fellows director Marlies Carruth. “They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment.”

(Photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)