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    MacArthur Foundation Announces 2024 ‘Genius’ Grant Winners

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    On Tuesday, 22 anonymously nominated Americans were recognized with fellowships and an $800,000 stipend.While the groundbreaking Indigenous teen comedy-drama “Reservation Dogs” may not have taken home any Emmys this year, the show’s co-creator Sterlin Harjo has been awarded a different prestigious prize: a MacArthur Fellowship.“The dreams that I had when I was young about changing the world and about changing representation and about showing us as real human beings, all of that meant something, and it did change the world,” Harjo said in an interview. He also co-wrote the new Netflix film “Rez Ball,” and has directed films, including “Love and Fury” and “Mekko.”Harjo, 44, is part of a new class of 22 MacArthur Fellows that includes a children’s and young adult author, a former U.S. poet laureate, two evolutionary biologists, an astronomer who uplifts underrepresented students and a pioneering alternative cabaret star.The honor is given out each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, recognizing individuals in a variety of fields. The fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached stipend of $800,000, disbursed over five years.The fellows, who were announced on Tuesday, were first submitted for consideration by a pool of anonymous nominators and then recommended to the foundation’s president and board by an independent selection committee. Since 1981, more than 1,100 people have been awarded the fellowship, which is commonly referred to as the “genius grant.”Recipients are not notified if they are being considered for the honor, so their selection comes as a surprise. This year, multiple fellows were told that the MacArthur Foundation wanted them to participate in a panel discussion, and would be calling them to organize the event. But when the call came, they were instead notified that they had been chosen as a fellow (and that the panel did not even exist).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $31.5 Million in Grants

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      The third round of funding for the year will support 226 projects across the country.A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to secure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century, and research for a book on the history of red hair are among 226 beneficiaries of new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.The grants, which total $31.5 million and are the third round awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Canada, England and the Netherlands.Such projects include a documentary, to be co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about the Colfax Massacre — named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists. Funding will also go toward research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his own time and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, said in a statement that the projects, which include educational programming for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources and experiences.”In New York, 31 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $4.6 million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a new permanent exhibition exploring 400 years of Brooklyn history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and the Hospital of the Innocents, a 600-year-old children’s care institution in Florence, Italy.Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, a U.S. government initiative that provided jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression, by the Washington-based Stone Soup Productions. Another grant will benefit a history of the Cherokee Nation being co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson College in North Carolina.The grants will also benefit the Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on a 1980s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over its Cold War-era MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $33.17 Million in Grants

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      In New York, the Tenement Museum, Women Make Movies, UnionDocs, LaGuardia Community College and more will receive funding.A book about Motown Productions, the film and television arm of the legendary Motown Records; preservation of the traditional language and lifestyle of Yup’ik and Cup’ik Alaskan Native people; and research on how communities — and insurance companies — in Bermuda understand risk caused by rising sea levels and climate change are among the 245 projects across the country that are receiving new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.The grants, which total $33.17 million, support historic collections, exhibitions and documentaries, humanities infrastructure, scholarly research and curriculum projects.Among the 13 categories in which the grants were awarded, the most money — $11 million — went toward 23 infrastructure and capacity building challenge grants, which leverage federal funds to spur nonfederal support for cultural institutions.Included in those were awards to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, to make collections documenting Hawaiian and Pacific history and culture more accessible, and to the First Peoples Fund in Rapid City, S.D., to create outdoor classroom spaces for education programs about the Lakota cultural traditions at the Pine Ridge Reservation’s Oglala Lakota Artspace.Thirty projects in New York state will receive $4.4 million in total funding, with $3.76 million going to 16 groups and individuals in New York City.In Brooklyn, UnionDocs will get $644,525 for the production of a film about the First Amendment and the balance between free speech principles and other core values. (The project is titled “Speaking Freely: The First Amendment and the Work of Preeminent Attorney Floyd Abrams” and will be directed by Yael Melamede.)In Long Island City, LaGuardia Community College will see $34,991 to create a liberal arts health humanities option with an interdisciplinary curriculum for undergraduates that focuses on the social, cultural and historical contexts of medical ethics, health and medicine.And in Manhattan, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum will receive $400,000 to support guided tours exploring the lives of African Americans and Irish immigrants in 19th-century New York City. Women Make Movies, also in Manhattan, will receive $500,000 toward the production of a film that explores the life and work of the Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid. The movie, “Jamaica Kincaid: Liberating the Daffodil,” will be directed by Stephanie Black.This crop of grants is the first round of funding from the agency under Shelly C. Lowe, the first Native American to lead the agency.“N.E.H. is proud to support these exemplary education, media, preservation, research and infrastructure projects,” Lowe said in a statement. “These 245 projects will expand the horizons of our knowledge of culture and history, lift up humanities organizations working to preserve and tell the stories of local and global communities, and bring high-quality public programs and educational resources directly to the American public.” More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $24.7 Million in New Grants

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      The awards will support projects including Cherokee language translation, a digital map of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, and a study of the secret language of French butchers.A “living history museum” based on the life of Dred Scott, digitization of books and manuscripts dispersed from the Philippines in the 18th century, a Cherokee translation effort, and an exhibit on the history of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, N.Y., are among 208 projects across the country that are receiving new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.The grants, which total $24.7 million, support individual scholarly projects and collaborative efforts, including initiatives and exhibitions at cultural institutions ranging from local history sites to behemoths like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The awards are part of the agency’s regular cycle of grants. Last year, the agency also distributed more than $140 million of additional grants supported by funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.Some of the new awards are dedicated to infrastructure. One grant, of $500,000, is going to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Institute in San Antonio to support the refurbishment of seven historic buildings to be used as a cultural center focused on the immigrant communities of the city’s Westside neighborhood. A grant of $20,000 will support digital upgrades at the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University, which aims to highlight the history of Great Plains communities at risk of being forgotten.There are also a number of grants to historically Black colleges and universities, including roughly $130,000 to Oakwood University in Huntsville, Ala., to create the living museum dedicated to Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose lawsuit seeking freedom resulted in the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision stating that African Americans could never be citizens.Other awards include nearly $45,000 to the University of Virginia, toward the creation of a database of 18th- and 19th-century North American weather records, including the detailed daily reports made by Thomas Jefferson between July 1776 and the week before his death in July 1826. There is also a $100,000 grant to Northeastern University in Boston, to support the translation of its Digital Archive of American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance, which gathers handwritten materials in the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system created in the early 19th century.In New York City, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens will receive $30,000 to support a digital mapping project exploring the history of jazz and hip-hop in the borough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will receive $350,000, to support biochemical analysis of the chia oil found in Mexican lacquerware and paintings by New Spanish artists in Mexico from the 16th to 19th centuries, to help with conservation and provenance research for works held in museums around the world. (The museum will collaborate with Grupo Artesanal Tecomaque, an Indigenous collective in Mexico that teaches sustainable lacquerware practices.)While most grants are directed toward institutions, there are also several dozen grants to individual scholars, some supporting “who knew?” topics like the history of Louchébem, described by the endowment as “a secret, highly endangered language spoken by Parisian butchers since the 13th century,” which was also used by some members of the French Resistance during World War II.The agency has an annual budget of roughly $167 million. In October, President Biden nominated Shelly C. Lowe, a scholar of higher education and longtime administrator, as its next director. If confirmed by the Senate, Lowe, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, will be the first Native American to lead the agency. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Awards Covid Relief Grants

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      The American Rescue Plan Act, with its $87.8 million in funding, will support projects at nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions in the country.The New York Public Library, the USS Constitution Museum in Boston and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Va., are among more than 300 beneficiaries of new Covid relief grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that are being announced on Monday.The grants, which total $87.8 million and are supported by $135 million in funding allocated to the endowment under the American Rescue Plan Act that was signed into law in March, will provide emergency relief to help offset pandemic-related financial losses at museums, libraries, universities and historical sites in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and Northern Marianas. The endowment distributed the first $52.6 million in June.Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the grants, which can be as much as $500,000 for organizations and $5 million for grant-making programs that distribute funds to organizations, “will save thousands of jobs in the humanities placed at risk by the pandemic and help bring economic recovery to cultural and educational institutions and those they serve.”The cultural and educational institutions will receive a total of $59 million from the endowment, and 13 grant-making organizations will receive $28.8 million to distribute to humanities projects undertaken by organizations or individuals.The funding, designed to allow organizations to retain and rehire staff, as well as rebuild programs and projects disrupted by the pandemic, will enable the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to develop an African-American oral history project at Monticello, the plantation where the former president lived until his death in 1826; allow the New York Public Library to expand its digitized collection of African American, African and African diasporic materials; and support the creation of hands-on experiences and virtual programming about the Navy ship anchored in Boston at the USS Constitution Museum.In New York, 33 of the state’s cultural organizations and three grant-making programs will receive a total of $16.2 million. Funding will support expanded access to materials by historically underrepresented artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s library collections; the hiring of a videographer at the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation to document the theater’s legacy, with a focus on African and African American culture; and planning for the Museum of the City of New York’s centennial year in 2023. Firelight Media, a nonprofit that supports filmmakers of color, will also receive $2 million for a grant program for 36 Black, Indigenous and people of color filmmakers whose work on documentary projects was disrupted by the pandemic.Elsewhere, the grants will allow both Old North Church in Boston and Christ Church in Philadelphia to investigate their ties to the colonial slave trade, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to design an immersive living history experience to introduce visitors to their history and culture, and the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Neb., to develop tours about the writer whose novels explore the lives of early pioneers there.Around 90 colleges and universities received funding to support their humanities programs and departments: Adjunct faculty at Seattle Central College will work with local tribal representatives to revise history and literature courses to incorporate Indigenous perspectives, the University of Oklahoma Press will develop a new Native American imprint in collaboration with the university’s Native Nations Center and East Tennessee State University will retain and rehire staff to support free online access to materials documenting the history of Southern Appalachia. More