On Wednesday morning, as has been happening annually since 1981, a small number of people have had their lives changed. This year, there are 22 of them, a group that has been formally announced as recipients of the 2025 MacArthur Fellowships, those so-called “genius grants.”
Spread across the globe, these people will be receiving monetary awards of $800,000, paid out in annual installments of $160,000 over five years. Candidates are suggested by outside sources. “Nominees are suggested by a constantly changing pool of invited external nominators,” according to the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, “chosen from as broad a range of fields and areas of interest as possible.”
The Foundation further informs us that a “fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight and potential.” Naturally, the foundation hopes that its money will be used by recipients for the financial freedom that might allow them to pursue their most innovative ideas and, in so doing, enrich the planet.
Generally, these awardees have worked in relative obscurity, many on college campuses. And many operate in relatively specialized areas such as atmospheric science, evolutionary biology and nuclear security.
Not so with Tonika Lewis Johnson. A 2025 MacArthur Fellow, the only from Illinois, she is a photographer and social justice artist, and she lives here in her native Englewood neighborhood with her 21-year-old son and 23-year-old daughter, who are in college, and not far from the homes of her father, Tony Lewis, an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and mother, Rita Lewis, a screenplay writer.
“They each have been incredibly influential,” she told the Tribune by phone on Monday.
As a teen, Johnson commuted to the North Side to attend Lane Tech College Prep, and came under the influence of the Tribune’s Ovie Carter (who gave her her first camera) and teacher John White of the Sun-Times, both Pulitzer Prize winners. She received a bachelor’s degree in the arts from Columbia College Chicago (2003) and an MBA from National Louis University (2005). Then she got to work, in a variety of ways.
Unlike many of her 2025 “genius” pals, she has already attracted media attention, profiled in the Tribune for her work and recognized in 2017 by Chicago Magazine as a Chicagoan of the Year.
The MacArthur folks lauded her for “documenting disparities in Chicago’s neighborhoods through participatory art projects that empower residents to confront and disrupt these inequities.”
Her acclaimed Folded Map Project is described on her website as a project to visually connect residents from corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago to show “how decades of harmful policies have divided Chicago socially and physically.”
“I am proud, of course, but this really isn’t about just me,” says the 45-year-old. “Though deeply personal, it not only validates the work I have been doing but is proof that Englewood means something. This neighborhood is not the problem and I hope what I am doing, what so many others are doing, can shift the narrative.”
She has said, “You can’t love a city without understanding it,” and she has been about the business of enlightening us. In conversation, she is palpably passionate. She plans to use the first installment of her “genius” money to buy a new camera and a new computer.
The 2025 class of MacArthur Fellows also includes, in alphabetical order:
Ángel F. Adams Corraliza, 37, Madison Wisconsin: An atmospheric scientist “investigating the mechanisms underlying tropical weather patterns … and phenomena such as tropical cyclones and monsoons.”
Matt Black, 55, Exeter, California: A photographer whose work chronicles “people and landscapes in marginalized communities across the U.S., such as the rural agricultural communities near his home in California’s Central Valley.”
Garrett Bradley, 39, New Orleans: An artist and filmmaker “blending elements of documentary, narrative and experimental cinema to explore questions of justice, public memory and cultural visibility.”
Heather Christian, 44, Beacon, New York: A composer, lyricist, playwright and vocalist “creating structurally complex works of music theater … that explore the possibility for the sacred and spiritual in our modern world.”
Nabarun Dasgupta, 46, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: An epidemiologist who “combines scientific studies with community engagement to improve the wellbeing and safety of people who use drugs and people living with debilitating pain.”
Kristina Douglass, 41, New York City: Focusing on coastal communities in Madagascar, this archaeologist investigates “how human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability.”
Kareem El-Badry, 31, Pasadena, California: An astrophysicist investigating how stars form, evolve and interact. His discoveries range from “overlooked dormant black holes in our galaxy to new classes of stars and coupled systems.”
Jeremy Frey, 46, Eddington, Maine: A member of the Passamaquoddy tribe and descended from a long line of Wabanaki basket makers, this artist balances “tradition with innovation in … creating visually stunning woven artworks.”
Hahrie Han, 50, Baltimore: A political scientist who employs “a range of ethnographic, sociological, experimental, and quantitative methods” to question “how and why people participate in civic and political life.”
Ieva Jusionyte, 41, Providence, Rhode Island: A cultural anthropologist who explores “the political and moral ambiguities of border regions, where state policies regulate historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices.”
Toby Kiers, 49, Amsterdam, Netherlands: An evolutionary biologist investigating symbiotic partnerships between plants, fungi and other microbes to show “that they are not passive accessories to plants but powerful actors in their own right.”
Jason McLellan, 44, Austin, Texas: A structural biologist working to prevent infectious diseases and develop “a universal vaccine that would be effective against all coronaviruses.”
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 49, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: A multidisciplinary artist whose films and sculptures give “aesthetic form to the enduring repercussions of violence and dispossession … traumas of war and displacement.”
Tommy Orange, 43, Oakland, California: Fiction writer “capturing a diverse range of Native American experiences and lives in novels that traverse time and space.”
Margaret Wickens Pearce, 60, Rockland, Maine: A cartographer “creating maps that foreground Indigenous Peoples’ understanding of land and place” and that “push the boundaries of cartography beyond two-dimensional depictions.”
Sébastien Philippe, 38, Madison, Wisconsin: A nuclear security specialist “exposing past harms and potential future risks from building, testing and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons.”
Gala Porras-Kim, 40, Los Angeles and London: “With nuance, empathy and, at times, playfulness,” this artist “probes the methods institutions use to classify, conserve, and interpret items in their collections.”
Teresa Puthussery, 46, Berkeley, California: “Neurobiologist and optometrist exploring how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the primate brain…laying the foundation for a more complete understanding of human vision.”
Craig Taborn, 55, Brooklyn, New York: A musician and composer whose improvisational work “creates singular soundscapes. … A rare artist of unusual depth and originality.”
William Tarpeh, 35, Stanford, California: A chemical engineer “developing sustainable and practical methods to recover valuable chemical resources from wastewater, focusing on recycling nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus.”
Lauren K. Williams, 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts: A mathematician who has made “significant contributions to numerous mathematical fields, including cluster algebras, representation theory and algebraic geometry.”
rkogan@chicagotribune.com