The MacArthur Foundation has named mixed-media artist Christine Sun Kim as one of its 2026 MacArthur Fellows. She is one of 20 recipients, among them the artists Rodney McMillian, Chip Thomas, and Vincent Valdez. Each fellow will be granted a sum of USD 800,000 over the course of five years to facilitate their research and practice.

Born in California in 1980 and based in Berlin, Kim has been Deaf since birth. Initially wanting to pursue graphic design but told that no university courses offered interpreters, she instead completed a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2006, followed by an MFA in sound and music at Bard College in 2013. In her early career, she began to draw on her own experience as a Deaf person to explore how communication is navigated throughout cultures. In 2019 she participated in the Whitney Biennial with her Degrees of Deaf Rage series (2018–19), which comprises charcoal illustrations expressing her frustration at the hurdles she had faced in cultural institutions. In 2020, she received the Ford Foundation’s Disability Future Fellowship. 

Her practice has since expanded into performance, music, and interactive installation, using dry humor to raise awareness of Deaf issues and to probe the societal, cultural, and bodily relationships to language and sound. Kim’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); the Shanghai and Berlin Biennales (both 2016); the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); the Secession in Vienna (2023); the Gwangju Biennale (2023); and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul (2026).

The MacArthur Fellowship, informally known as the “genius grant,” has been awarded annually since 1981 to people in fields ranging from writing and the arts to science and teaching. Kristen Mack, vice president of communications for MacArthur Fellows and Partnerships, stated that past fellows have “defied boundaries by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress.” The foundation described Kim as an artist befitting of this legacy, citing her ability to explore “the political, cultural, and multisensory dimensions of sound, spoken language, and communication.”

Harison Butler is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.