Yesterday, The MacArthur Foundation unveiled its 2015 winners. The awardees are better known as the “genius grant” recipients. Each awardee receives $625,000 over five years, with no strings attached. They are selected because they have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. This year, nine women (of the twenty four winners), who are groundbreaking in their fields of neuroscience, photography, tap dancing, history, set design, fabrication, poetry, and economy, received the coveted prize. As the Foundation noted:
“These delightfully diverse MacArthur Fellows are shedding light and making progress on critical issues, pushing the boundaries of their fields, and improving our world in imaginative, unexpected ways. Their work, their commitment, and their creativity inspire us all.” . Here are highlights from this year’s class of ‘genius’ women. You can read more about these women and the entire list of winners here.. . 1. Mimi Lien Set Designer, Age 39 Mimi Lien is a set designer for theater, opera, and dance whose bold, immersive designs shape and extend a dramatic text’s narrative and emotional dynamics. Lien combines training in set design and architecture with an innate dramaturgical insight, and she is adept at configuring a performance space to establish particular relationships—both among the characters on stage and between the audience and the actors—that dramatize the play’s movement through space and time. . . 2.
Marina Rustow
Historian, Age 46
Marina Rustow is a historian using the Cairo Geniza texts to shed new light on Jewish life and on the broader society of the medieval Middle East. The Cairo Geniza (or Genizah) comprises hundreds of thousands of legal documents, letters, and literary materials—many of them fragmentary—deposited in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue over more than a millennium. Deploying her considerable prowess in languages, social history, and papyrology, Rustow is rewriting our understanding of medieval Jewish life and transforming the historical study of the Fatimid empire.
3.
Beth Stevens
Neuroscientist, Age 45
I always love the Wednesday Five. Thanks for an uplifting and inspiring post.