Playwright Dominique Morisseau, composer Matthew Aucoin and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili are among this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants.
The 25 people selected for 2018 will receive a stipend of $625,000, to be paid in quarterly installments over five years. The grants are designed to help fuel the work of artists, scientists and others who are on the forefront of social change and innovation. “The purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society,” per the foundation.
Morisseau is a residency playwright at Off Broadway’s Signature Theater. She’s known for her trilogy “The Detroit Project,” which examines the city’s evolution during three distinct time periods, starting with 2013’s “Detroit ’67.” She has had work commissioned by the Steppenwolf Theatre, the Hip Hop Theater Festival, the South Coast Repertory, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Aucoin is an artist in residence at the Los Angeles Opera and co-artistic director of the American Modern Opera Company. He has conducted his own works and that of other composers for the Los Angeles Opera, the American Repertory Theater, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera.
Okpokwasili is the Bronx-born daughter of Nigerian immigrants known for works that examine the lives of women of color, notably her 2014 one-woman show “Bronx Gothic.”
Click here for a link to the full list of 2018 grant recipients.
(Pictured: Dominique Morisseau)