This year’s women recipients of the MacArthur Genius grant, which awards annual $625,000 fellowships to innovative people doing ill shit for the world, include a neuroscientist, a tap dancer, a historian, an off-Broadway set designer, a photographer and a poet. LET’S GET INSPIRED.
Mimi Lien, a 39-year-old set designer from New York (above), tells the Foundation that she got into her field because it was “exactly the way she wanted to talk about space, but it was fictional architecture.” She designed the set for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (which, incidentally, starred Hamilton’s Philippa Soo, colleague of fellow 2015 MacArthur Genius Lin-Manuel Miranda), described as “a full-scale Tsarist Russian salon that summoned up the decadence of early nineteenth-century Moscow and the chaotic emotional lives of the Russian elite.” She also once designed a set in a giant meadow.
One of the winners, Alex Truesdell, runs the Adaptive Design Association, a company creating custom furniture and other tools to help children with disabilities “participate actively in their homes, schools, and communities.” Before the grant, though, she told the Washington Post she was in constant fear that her company would go out of business: ““Until two weeks ago,” she said, “I’ve lived a constant terror that we wouldn’t make it,” proof positive of what a blessing the Grant can be.
Michelle Dorrance, a tap dancer and choreographer from New York, emphasizes the essential musical element of tap doubling as a rhythmic percussion, and in some pieces has choreographed dancers to kick off electronic loops with their steps. She runs her own studio, Dorrance dance, but before that was in STOMP. Who doesn’t love STOMP!