The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its 2026 fellows class on Tuesday, awarding $800,000 to each of 20 recipients over the next five years. These unrestricted grants, commonly called “genius grants,” have no reporting requirements, application process or strings attached. The fellows work in fields ranging from performing arts to social sciences, span four decades in age and live on three continents.
The MacArthur award rests on a particular philosophy: talented individuals don’t need government oversight or bureaucratic metrics to justify support. Rather than impose mandates, the foundation trusts recipients to direct resources toward their creative and scholarly pursuits. No progress reports. No accountability forms. Just capital for human capability, and the assumption that exceptional people will use it well.
The Selection Process
The foundation doesn’t accept applications. Instead, an evolving list of outside nominators recommends candidates for review by a confidential committee. This approach avoids the administrative machinery that typically consumes resources in grant-making. There’s no bureaucracy to navigate and no compliance infrastructure to maintain. It’s a lean model: identify talent, vet it privately, write checks and step back.
Kristen Mack, vice president of communications for fellows and partnerships at the MacArthur Foundation, said the fellows “explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research.” She added: “They show us new ways to understand the world.”
Young Voices and Unconventional Approaches
Immanuel Wilkins, a 29-year-old Brooklyn-based saxophonist, bandleader and composer, was riding Amtrak from New York to Philadelphia when the foundation called. He waited until he got off the train to hear the news. “I was just outside. Which was nice because then I could yell as loud as I wanted to and celebrate,” he said. Wilkins is the youngest fellow in the class.
Wilkins’ work shows how private support can fund ambitious artistic experimentation. His debut album, “Omega,” connects the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, with the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager. He told The Associated Press that music’s abstraction lets him represent the stories without “recreating the violence of them.”
He’s also exploring whether jazz swing, which written scores struggle to represent, could take shape through sculptures or spectrograms. In “RECESS,” an immersive experience recently presented in Philadelphia, he performed on an industrial jungle gym that served as both bandstand and playground, attempting a “graphic score.” He said: “The system of Western notation, as we know it, doesn’t have the capacity to hold the sound of Black music. Like, a lot of what makes Black music maybe sound ‘Black’ is these quantum entanglements with the time. I’m kind of trying to radically debate: what actually is this Western system of notation holding when it comes to Black music? That opens up a wide set of possibilities for what a score could look like.”
Academic Work on Economic History
Ellora Derenoncourt, a New Jersey-based associate professor in Princeton University’s department of economics, is a labor economist and economic historian. She wants to use the award’s platform to explain economic justice to the public and policymakers. Her research examines how specific policies have narrowed or widened economic disparities over time.
A 2021 paper found 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 explained how northern cities spent less on education and recreation in communities where the Great Migration sent millions of Black Americans.
Derenoncourt raised concerns about data availability. She said the Trump administration’s removal of workforce demographic reporting requirements and limits on other official data sources could leave her field without the information needed to measure current racial inequality. “Universities and researchers must find ways to maintain robust data sets,” she said. “I hope that I can take this responsibility seriously to highlight these issues. And maybe also make some more people into history nerds. Because I think, really, we need to turn back the clock to figure out sometimes either what works or what has made things the way they are today.”
Visual Artists Reclaiming Narrative
Visual artist Vincent Valdez, a contemporary painter, was drawing in his studio when the foundation called and went “deathly silent.” He said most artists know the award and its 45-year legacy of recognizing people “pushing boundaries.”
Valdez uses representational paintings that recall murals of the southwestern United States to examine American identity. He said murals gave his Mexican American community an “undeniable presence” for stories absent from dominant culture. His work aims to counter “social amnesia” and help the public remember “what we are and where we’re headed.”
Valdez’s 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 the 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.” Its colorful portraits stand vertically rather than horizontally and highlight overlooked “pillars” of society whom he sees as “fighting the good fight.”
Valdez’s work also addresses sports and community displacement. He remembered attending San Antonio Spurs games with his father, where he was “overwhelmed” and “mesmerized” by fans’ unified effort as they performed a vertical version of “the wave,” from courtside to the last-row dollar seats. “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,” Valdez said.
No Mandates, No Bureaucracy
Awardees who spoke with The Associated Press had no concrete plans for spending the award. The MacArthur Foundation doesn’t require them to provide an answer. The program requires no progress reports and accepts no applications. The cohort’s work also spans other disciplines: 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.
Why This Matters:
The MacArthur model contrasts sharply with government-administered grant systems. By eliminating application processes, reporting requirements and compliance infrastructure, the foundation maximizes the share of capital that reaches creative work. No bureaucrats review progress metrics or audit trails. No administrators justify their positions by building layers of oversight. Recipients can pursue their vision without constantly reporting to funders or reshaping their work around predetermined measurable outcomes. This efficiency—getting money to talent without bureaucratic friction—shows what private philanthropy can accomplish when it trusts judgment and minimizes administrative overhead. For policymakers, it raises a question worth considering: how much government grant-making could deliver better results by adopting similar simplicity?