The idea behind the grants is to give people of “exceptional creativity” the “flexibility” to further pursue their ideas and projects.
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Basting learned of the fellowship via phone a few weeks ago while driving.
Others chosen ranged from financial service innovator Jose A. Quinonez and human rights attorney Ahilan Arulanantham to linguist Daryl Baldwin and bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum.
According to the foundation’s website, they award a $625,000 stipend to each of the 23 total geniuses. They are breaking new ground in areas of public concern, in the arts, and in the sciences, often in unexpected ways. She was recognized as an “artist and educator demonstrating the potential of storytelling and creative expression to improve the lives of elders experiencing cognitive impairment”, with the overall goal of changing the way we think about aging.
According to the foundation’s website, “Rankine told Time magazine that she meant to use the grant to set up a ‘Racial Imaginary Institute, ‘ which would enable creative thinkers ‘to come together in a kind of laboratory environment to talk about the making of art and culture and … the dismantling of white dominance'”.
Stillman, an investigative journalist and writer for The New Yorker, has written about social injustice, such as the abuse of civil asset forfeiture after drug-dealing arrests and the conditions of foreign logistics workers on American bases in Afghanistan.
A NY based art historian and curator bringing the work of critically important, but under-recognized, black artists into the canons of modern and contemporary art.
“Julia Wolfe is a composer who combines influences from folk, classical, and rock genres in works that are grounded in historical and legendary narratives”. His plays include An Octoroon, Neighbors, Appropriate, in which siblings discover their father’s association with the Ku Klux Klan. Fellows, brought to the foundation’s attention by an anonymous pool of nominators, do not apply for the money and are not informed they’ve been chosen until shortly before the awards are announced.
The last person to receive the grant in Wisconsin was Will Allen in 2008 – founder of Growing Power. She then called her husband, photographer Brad Lichtenstein, but she was sworn to secrecy and couldn’t tell anyone else until Wednesday’s late-night announcement. “I still look at my notebooks from those years to see if there are any books or films that someone (as likely to be a peer as faculty) told me about, that I haven’t looked at yet”.
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YaleNews hopes to catch up with the other Yale winners down the road.
