NEW ORLEANS, La. (BRPROUD) — Two New Orleans women were named among the 20 MacArthur Foundation fellows for 2023 on Wednesday, Oct. 4.
The program gives $800,000 in equal quarterly installments over five years to people highlighted for exceptional work and creativity.
Andrea Armstrong teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans. Notably, she made the Incarceration Transparency Project, a study listing all inmate deaths in Louisiana prisons, jails and youth detention centers over six years. Her work to date also includes a guide for other law professors who want to use her methods to teach law students, get public records, conduct trauma-informed interviews and compile and inspect data to understand what areas need the most immediate interventions and what kinds.
Courtney Bryan teaches music at the Newcomb Department of Music at Tulane University. According to the MacArthur Foundation, the “composer and pianist threaded together elements of jazz, classical, and sacred music in pieces that foreground the lived experiences of African Americans.” Her work combines sacred music elements with recordings of themes around police brutality and other political issues deeply affecting the Black community.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has a 40-year history of philanthropy. According to the organization, it’s donated $6.8 billion globally.
Previous MacArthur Fellows in Louisiana include:
- 1992: Lourna Bourg, a rural development leader in New Iberia, Joanna Scott, a writer in New Orleans, and John T. Scott, a sculptor in New Orleans.
- 1993: Ernest J. Gaines, a writer in Lafayette.
- 1999: Wilma Alpha Subra, an environmental health scientist in New Iberia.
- 2012: Nancy Rabalais, a marine ecologist in Chauvin.
- 2017: Jesmyn Ward, a fiction writer in New Orleans.
“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with a global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities. They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program.
Other 2023 fellows include:
- E. Tendayi Achiume, a legal scholar in Los Angeles.
- Rina Foygel Barber, a statistician in Chicago.
- Ian Bassin, a lawyer and democracy advocate in Washington, D.C.
- Jason D. Buenrostro, a cellular and molecular biologist in Cambridge, Mass.
- María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a multidisciplinary artist in Nashville, Tenn.
- Raven Chacon, a composer and artist in Red Hook, N.Y.
- Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and reproductive health researcher in San Francisco.
- Lucy Hutyra, an environmental ecologist in Boston.
- Carolyn Lazard, an artists in Philadelphia.
- Ada Limón, a poet in Lexington, Ky.
- Lester Mackey, a computer scientist and statistician in Cambridge, Mass.
- Patrick Makuakāne, a kumu hula (master teacher) and cultural preservationist in San Francisco.
- Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer in Blacksburg, Va.
- Manuel Muñoz, a fiction writer in Tuscon, Ariz.
- Imani Perry, an interdisciplinary scholar and writer in Cambridge, Mass.
- Dyani White Hawk, a multidisciplinary artist in Shakopee, Minn.
- A. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist in Los Angeles.
- Amber Wutich, an anthropologist in Tempe, Ariz.
