Desmond’s forthcoming book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” (Crown, due out in March), draws on his research to tell the stories of eight families living in poverty in Milwaukee and the two landlords who own the properties where they live.
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MacArthur Foundation awards are called “genius” grants for a reason.
Inspired by the Depression-era photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans (but determined that it would not be “outsiders” who took the pictures), Frazier, who was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts, will have her first solo exhibition in France when “Performing Social Landscapes” opens October. 16 at the Carre de l’Art in Nimes. An artist whose paintings, sculptures and drawings explore such themes as gender and sexuality, family dynamics and the inequities of power and wealth. “I’m very early in my career and I’m just getting started in the work I want to do”, she said. Judges said she “restored to the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century”.
Mimi Lien, 39, New York: This New York-based set designer is no stranger to Chicagoans, having designed last year’s “The World of Extreme Happiness” at the Goodman Theatre.
— Nicole Eisenman, 50, New York.
Composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the hit musicals In the Heights, and Hamilton, which have helped infuse musical theater with the contemporary vitality of hip hop, R&B, and pop music. Still, pairing street rapping with America’s founding narrative seems worthy of acknowledgment.
The 2015 winners have studied everything from the brain to prehistoric Greek societies.
John Novembre, 37, Chicago: “Computational biologist shedding new light on the links between geography and genomic diversity and producing a more finely grained picture of human evolutionary history”.
— Christopher Re, 36, Stanford, California.
Juan Salgado, CEO of Instituto Del Progreso Latino, at his office in Chicago on September 15, 2015.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center stem cell biologist Lorenz Studer, 49, is pioneering an imaginative new method to help treat Parkinson’s disease.
— Michelle Dorrance, 36, New York. The 2015 class of “geniuses” (a term the foundation avoids for its connotation of “a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess”) contains familiar names and faces, as well as less well-known individuals, thrust suddenly into a much brighter spotlight as a result of their having being included in the fellowship’s illustrious roster.
The 34-year-old assistant professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focuses on the causes and effects of innovation within health care markets, revealing how the timing and nature of intellectual property restrictions can affect change in the field.
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Peidong Yang, 44, Berkeley, Calif.: If scientists ever create an artificial leaf that uses artificial photosynthesis to turn solar energy into fuel, Yang, an inorganic chemist transforming the field of semiconductor nanowires, may be the person to do it.
