Four Artists Win 2025 MacArthur Fellowships
65Oct. 9, 2025
Artist and filmmakerGarrett Bradley, interdisciplinary artistGala Porras-Kim, multidisciplinary artistTuan Andrew Nguyen, and basket artistJeremy Freyhave been named as among the 2025 class of MacArthur Fellows by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The four join eighteen other recipients of the transformative “genius” grants issued this year by the foundation and recognizing individuals in a broad range of fields including sociology, computer science, and oceanography. Each fellow is awarded an $800,000 stipend, with no strings attached.
“The 2025 MacArthur Fellows expand the boundaries of knowledge, artistry, and human understanding,” said Kristen Mack, a MacArthur Foundation vice president, in a statement. “They focus our attention on microbial worlds and distant stars, community vitality and timeless traditions, sacred and improvisational music, and shared histories of our time on Earth. With virtuosity, persistence, and courage, they chart new paths toward collaborative, creative, and flourishing futures.”
The New Orleans–based Bradley is known for films and video installations combining documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema to investigate such themes as justice, public memory, and cultural visibility. Among her notable works areAmerica, 2019, a multichannel installation drawing on a 1915 film believed to be the oldest surviving motion picture featuring an all-Black cast, and the 2020 feature-length documentaryTime, which explores the Black female experience of the incarceration of loved ones.
Dividing her time between London and Los Angeles, Porras-Kim has historically examined the methods institutions use to classify, conserve, and interpret items in their collections, focusing on objects and forms of knowledge that have been separated from their original contexts. Recent works have seen her turning her attention to the natural world, as evidenced by a work in her 2024 exhibition “A Hand in Nature,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, for which she released molecules trapped in 8,000-year-old glacial ice cores into the air of the institution, mingling the ancient and the contemporary.
Nguyen, who lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, creates films and sculptures embodying the ripple effects of violence and dispossession. His four-channel videoThe Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019, investigates the prejudice encountered by people descended from Senegalese soldiers from the French colonial army and their Vietnamese wives, while his 2022 filmThe Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizondepicts the present-day life of a woman in Quang Tri, a Vietnamese province strewn with unexploded ordnance left over from the Vietnam War.
A member of the Passamaquoddy tribe, Frey, of Eddington, Maine, is a seventh-generation Wabanaki basket maker and novelist whose work centers Native Americans. Foraging for raw materials, he creates baskets, many of atypically large scale, that blur the boundaries between craft, design, and contemporary art. Though he hews to traditional sustainable practices and uses such historical materials as brown ash wood, sweet grass, and porcupine quills, he often does so in a way that is thoroughly contemporary, as suggested for example byNearlyMonochrome, 2022, which incorporates braided ash around the neck, the wood’s placement defying tradition.