The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named its 2026 class of fellows, awarding 20 scholars, artists, and scientists its renowned no-strings-attached grants of $800,000 each. The fellowships, popularly known as "genius grants," are among the most prestigious honors in American intellectual and creative life, and this year's cohort spans an unusually broad range of disciplines—from forensic anthropology and labor economics to organic chemistry, public art, and experimental jazz.
According to the foundation, this year's winners arrive from widely varied professional backgrounds, yet their work often converges in unexpected ways. Several fellows, for instance, are united by a shared inquiry into human connection and healing, even though they pursue that theme through radically different creative and scholarly standpoints. Among them are visual and sound artist Christine Sun Kim, philosopher and cognitive scientist Felipe De Brigard, and novelist Bryan Washington.
The MacArthur Fellows program is distinctive for the freedom it grants recipients. The award carries no requirements or restrictions on how the money may be spent, a design intended to give fellows the latitude to pursue ambitious projects, take creative risks, or simply devote themselves more fully to work that might otherwise be difficult to fund. The foundation selects fellows through a network of anonymous scouts who identify candidates across a spectrum of fields, with selection criteria centering on exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances, and potential to facilitate subsequent creative work.
Several members of the 2026 class focus their scholarship on climate change, approaching the issue from social-scientific and policy perspectives rather than purely technical ones. Holly Jean Buck, a sociologist at the University of Buffalo, examines the ethical and political questions surrounding climate policy. Her 2019 book "After Geoengineering" argues that carbon removal systems ought to be designed to serve local communities and the broader public interest rather than corporate profit—a position that places questions of justice and governance at the center of debates often dominated by engineering and economics.
The class also includes Ellora Derenoncourt, a labor economist and economic historian whose research examines wage gaps between racial groups. Her work contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to quantify and explain persistent economic disparities, tracing their roots through historical labor markets and institutions. Such research has become increasingly influential in policy discussions about inequality, and the fellowship provides her with resources to expand an agenda that bridges economic history and contemporary labor analysis.
Forensic anthropologist Kate Spradley represents another dimension of the cohort: the intersection of science and humanitarian commitment. Spradley is known for her work repatriating the remains of migrants who died along the Texas-Mexico border, an effort that combines rigorous forensic method with a mission to return unidentified individuals to their families and communities. Her inclusion underscores how the fellowship often recognizes scholars whose work carries direct moral and public consequences beyond the academy.
The sciences are further represented by organic chemist Song Lin, whose research advances fundamental chemical knowledge with potential applications across medicine and materials. Public artist Chip Thomas rounds out a group whose creative practices range from the gallery and concert hall to the street and the landscape. Thomas's work as a public artist reflects a tradition of socially engaged art-making that unfolds in shared civic spaces rather than exclusively in museums.
Music is represented in this year's class by a saxophonist whose live performances incorporate an unusual element: a chef cooking meals onstage. The pairing of improvised music with live culinary performance blurs conventional boundaries between artistic disciplines and turns the concert into a communal, sensory experience. It is precisely the kind of genre-defying practice the MacArthur Foundation has historically sought to recognize.
Taken together, the 2026 fellows illustrate the foundation's longstanding practice of casting a wide net across American intellectual and cultural life. Past classes have included poets, neuroscientists, historians, choreographers, community organizers, and journalists, and the program has often been credited with elevating figures whose influence later became widely felt—sometimes years or decades after the award.
The $800,000 stipend, paid out over five years, has grown substantially since the program's early days, reflecting both inflation and the foundation's assessment of what meaningful creative freedom now requires. Recipients frequently describe the grant as transformative not only financially but psychologically, granting them permission to pursue questions and projects that peer review panels and conventional funding sources might deem too risky or too slow to develop.
For the 2026 recipients, the award arrives at a moment when many of their fields face intensifying pressures—from debates over climate policy and economic inequality to questions about the role of public art and the sustainability of live performance. The foundation's bet is that untethered support for individual creativity will yield insights and works that no targeted grant program could anticipate.
The new fellows join a community of several hundred MacArthur recipients named since the program began in 1981. While the foundation does not accept applications or nominations from the public, its anonymous selection process is designed to identify talent across boundaries of discipline, institution, and geography. The 2026 class, announced September 29, will begin receiving their awards as they continue work that the foundation's scouts judged to hold exceptional promise.
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