The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 20 people as its 2026 fellows, awarding each $800,000 over the next five years through a process with no applications and a confidential review committee. The grants carry no strings attached, but the foundation and its selection machinery decide who receives the money.
Artist Vincent Valdez described the collective effort he sees in sports: “If we can do it for sports on any given Saturday and Sunday in this country, then we can do this as a collective people for the things that truly matter and affect our daily lives and the lives of our neighbors.” It’s a vision of people acting together. The fellowship program, by contrast, routes resources through private selection.
Who Gets to Decide
An evolving list of outside nominators recommends candidates, and a confidential committee reviews them. The program accepts no applications and requires no progress reports. Awardees who spoke with The Associated Press said they had no concrete plans for spending the money, and the foundation doesn’t require them to provide one.
Recipients can pursue artistic or scholarly work without reporting back to the funder. But the selection process remains outside public application and review. The foundation describes the grants as recognition of “exceptional creativity.” Kristen Mack, vice president of communications for fellows and partnerships at the MacArthur Foundation, said fellows “explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research.”
Immanuel Wilkins, a 29-year-old Brooklyn-based saxophonist, bandleader and composer, connects the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, with the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager, on his debut album, “Omega.” Wilkins told The Associated Press that music’s abstraction lets him represent those stories without “recreating the violence of them.”
Wilkins also questions the limits of Western musical notation. “The system of Western notation, as we know it, doesn't have the capacity to hold the sound of Black music,” he said, describing his effort to imagine other ways to represent jazz swing. In “RECESS,” an immersive experience recently presented in his hometown of Philadelphia, he played on an industrial jungle gym that served as both bandstand and playground as he attempted a “graphic score.”
History, Inequality and the State’s Data
Ellora Derenoncourt, a New Jersey-based associate professor in Princeton University’s department of economics, studies labor and economic history. History, she said, can explain the origins of inequality and identify “watershed moments” when public policies narrowed disparities.
A 2021 paper showed that the Black-white earnings gap declined after Congress raised the minimum wage and extended its protections to industries including agriculture, domestic services and healthcare. Another project examined how northern cities spent less on education and recreation in communities where the Great Migration sent millions of Black Americans fleeing low wages and racial barriers in the South. That research traces inequality not to abstract forces, but to policy choices and the distribution of public resources.
Derenoncourt said the Trump administration removed workforce demographic reporting requirements and limited other official data sources, changes that could leave researchers without information needed to measure current racial inequality. Universities and researchers, she said, must find ways to maintain robust data sets. “I hope that I can take this responsibility seriously to highlight these issues,” she said. “And maybe also make some more people into history nerds.”
Who Gets Remembered
Valdez uses representational paintings that recall murals of the southwestern United States to examine American identity. Murals gave his Mexican American community an “undeniable presence” for stories absent from dominant culture, he said. His work aims to counter “social amnesia” and help the public remember “what we are and where we're headed.”
His 30-foot-wide painting “The City I” depicts a modern Ku Klux Klan, with hooded figures holding a smartphone, a beer and a Pikachu-toting baby. The second part of his trilogy, “Dream Baby Dream,” places Muhammad Ali’s many eulogists in boxes modeled on “The Brady Bunch” title sequence. Valdez is working on the final installment, “The New Americans,” whose portraits highlight overlooked “pillars” of society.
The cohort also includes a philosopher applying cognitive science to memory and forgiveness, a poet reworking historical texts to examine colonial violence and Native American resilience, and a choreographer breaking down barriers between dance styles across time and place. The foundation calls its grants flexible support for work that expands understanding. Its structure remains clear: a private institution chooses the recipients, while artists and scholars carry the work of making ignored histories visible.