The MacArthur Fellows, aka the recipients of the MacArthur Genius Grants, receive a no strings attached award of $625,000 spread out over the next five years. It is a tremendous honor limited to a select group of candidates from all walks of intellectual and creative pursuits. The award is designed to acknowledge people who have made extraordinary contributions in their field and have the potential to continue to innovate in the future. Previous honorees include Julie Taymor, Cormac McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich. The 2015 Fellows include a few very familiar faces from entertainment news in the past few weeks. Tony Award-winning composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (whose musical Hamilton is taking over the world) and journalist Ta-Neisha Coates (who was just tapped to write Marvel's Black Panther comic series) are probably the most well-known honorees this year.
Here are all the 2015 Fellows and the fields they're recognized for.
Patrick Awuah, education entrepreneur Kartik Chandran, environmental engineer at Columbia University Ta-Nehisi Coates, journalist, blogger, and memoirist Gary Cohen, environmental health advocate Matthew Desmond, sociologist at Harvard University William Dichtel, chemist at Cornell University Michelle Dorrance, tapdancer and choreographer Nicole Eisenman, painter LaToya Ruby Frazier, photographer and video artist Ben Lerner, writer Mimi Lien, set designer Lin-Manuel Miranda, playwright, composer, and performer Dimitri Nakassis, classicist at the University of Toronto John Novembre, computational biologist at the University of Chicago Christopher Ré, computer scientist Marina Rustow, historian at Princeton University[44] Juan Salgado, Chicago-based community leader Beth Stevens, neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School Lorenz Studer, stem-cell biologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Alex Truesdell, designer at the Adaptive Design Association Basil Twist, puppeteer Ellen Bryant Voigt, poet Heidi Williams, economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Peidong Yang, inorganic chemist
You can find out more about all 24 fellows at the MacArthur Foundation website.