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 \u201cgenius grants.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cNominees are suggested by a constantly changing pool of invited external nominators,\u201d according to the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, \u201cchosen from as broad a range of fields and areas of interest as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Foundation further informs us that a \u201cfellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person\u2019s originality, insight and potential.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey each have been incredibly influential,\u201d she told the Tribune by phone on Monday.<\/p>\n
As a teen, Johnson commuted to the North Side to attend Lane Tech College Prep, and came under the influence of the Tribune\u2019s Ovie Carter (who gave her her first camera) and teacher John White of the Sun-Times, both Pulitzer Prize winners. She received a bachelor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Unlike many of her 2025 \u201cgenius\u201d pals, she has already attracted media attention, profiled in the Tribune<\/a> for her work and recognized in 2017 by Chicago Magazine as a Chicagoan of the Year<\/a>.<\/p>\n The MacArthur folks lauded her for \u201cdocumenting disparities in Chicago\u2019s neighborhoods through participatory art projects that empower residents to confront and disrupt these inequities.\u201d<\/p>\n Her acclaimed Folded Map Project<\/a> is described on her website<\/a> as a project to visually connect residents from corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago to show \u201chow decades of harmful policies have divided Chicago socially and physically.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am proud, of course, but this really isn\u2019t about just me,\u201d says the 45-year-old. \u201cThough 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.\u201d<\/p>\n She has said, \u201cYou can\u2019t love a city without understanding it,\u201d 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 \u201cgenius\u201d money to buy a new camera and a new computer.<\/p>\n The 2025 class of MacArthur Fellows also includes, in alphabetical order:<\/p>\n \u00c1ngel F. Adams Corraliza, 37, Madison Wisconsin: An atmospheric scientist\u00a0 \u201cinvestigating the mechanisms underlying tropical weather patterns \u2026 and phenomena such as tropical cyclones and monsoons.\u201d<\/p>\n Matt Black, 55, Exeter, California: A photographer whose work chronicles \u201cpeople and landscapes in marginalized communities across the U.S., such as the rural agricultural communities near his home in California\u2019s Central Valley.\u201d<\/p>\n Garrett Bradley, 39, New Orleans: An artist and filmmaker \u201cblending elements of documentary, narrative and experimental cinema to explore questions of justice, public memory and cultural visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Heather Christian, 44, Beacon, New York: A composer, lyricist, playwright and vocalist \u201ccreating structurally complex works of music theater \u2026 that explore the possibility for the sacred and spiritual in our modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n Nabarun Dasgupta, 46, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: An epidemiologist who \u201ccombines scientific studies with community engagement to improve the wellbeing and safety of people who use drugs and people living with debilitating pain.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristina Douglass, 41, New York City: Focusing on coastal communities in Madagascar, this archaeologist investigates \u201chow human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability.\u201d<\/p>\n Kareem El-Badry, 31, Pasadena, California: An astrophysicist investigating how stars form, evolve and interact. His discoveries range from \u201coverlooked dormant black holes in our galaxy to new classes of stars and coupled systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeremy Frey, 46, Eddington, Maine: A member of the Passamaquoddy tribe and descended from a long line of Wabanaki basket makers, this artist balances \u201ctradition with innovation in \u2026 creating visually stunning woven artworks.\u201d<\/p>\n Hahrie Han, 50, Baltimore: A political scientist who employs \u201ca range of ethnographic, sociological, experimental, and quantitative methods\u201d to question \u201chow and why people participate in civic and political life.\u201d<\/p>\n Ieva Jusionyte, 41, Providence, Rhode Island: A cultural anthropologist who explores \u201cthe political and moral ambiguities of border regions, where state policies regulate historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices.\u201d<\/p>\n Toby Kiers, 49, Amsterdam, Netherlands: An evolutionary biologist investigating symbiotic partnerships between plants, fungi and other microbes to show \u201cthat they are not passive accessories to plants but powerful actors in their own right.\u201d<\/p>\n Jason McLellan, 44, Austin, Texas: A structural biologist working to prevent infectious diseases and develop \u201ca universal vaccine that would be effective against all coronaviruses.\u201d<\/p>\n Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 49, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: A multidisciplinary artist whose films and sculptures give \u201caesthetic form to the enduring repercussions of violence and dispossession \u2026 traumas of war and displacement.\u201d<\/p>\n Tommy Orange, 43, Oakland, California: Fiction writer \u201ccapturing a diverse range of Native American experiences and lives in novels that traverse time and space.\u201d<\/p>\n Margaret Wickens Pearce, 60, Rockland, Maine: A cartographer \u201ccreating maps that foreground Indigenous Peoples\u2019 understanding of land and place\u201d and that \u201cpush the boundaries of cartography beyond two-dimensional depictions.\u201d<\/p>\n S\u00e9bastien Philippe, 38, Madison, Wisconsin: A nuclear security specialist \u201cexposing past harms and potential future risks from building, testing and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n Gala Porras-Kim, 40, Los Angeles and London: \u201cWith nuance, empathy and, at times, playfulness,\u201d this artist \u201cprobes the methods institutions use to classify, conserve, and interpret items in their collections.\u201d<\/p>\n Teresa Puthussery, 46, Berkeley, California: \u201cNeurobiologist and optometrist exploring how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the primate brain\u2026laying the foundation for a more complete understanding of human vision.\u201d<\/p>\n Craig Taborn, 55, Brooklyn, New York: A musician and composer whose improvisational work \u201ccreates singular soundscapes. \u2026 A rare artist of unusual depth and originality.\u201d<\/p>\n William Tarpeh, 35, Stanford, California: A chemical engineer \u201cdeveloping sustainable and practical methods to recover valuable chemical resources from wastewater, focusing on recycling nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus.\u201d<\/p>\n Lauren K. Williams, 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts: A mathematician who has made \u201csignificant contributions to numerous mathematical fields, including cluster algebras, representation theory and algebraic geometry.\u201d<\/p>\n rkogan@chicagotribune.com<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday morning, as has been happening annually since 1981, a small number of people have had their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,28,229,88,2558,3,2628],"class_list":{"0":"post-209582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-latest-headlines","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-things-to-do"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}