Artists Gala Porras-Kim and Tuan Andrew Nguyen are among the 22 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowship, which is presented by the private MacArthur Foundation to outstanding individuals across various disciplines. 

Established in 1981, the prestigious “no-strings-attached” award (which is colloquially dubbed the “genius grant”) comes with a USD 800,000 stipend that is paid out over five years in quarterly instalments. 

Gala Porras-Kim is a Colombian-Korean-American interdisciplinary artist whose works probe institutional taxonomies of cultural artifacts. Her research-based projects often engage with archaeological fragments, ritual objects, and neglected materials to interrogate the ethical, historical, and spiritual dimensions of museum collections.

Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen weaves together film, sculpture, and installation to examine the lasting impacts of violence, war, and displacement on communities in Vietnam and beyond. In his practice, he considers material objects and moving images as repositories of memory, creating poetic narratives that resist colonial erasure and encourage collective healing. 

Joan Yiquan Chen is an editorial intern at AAP.