Painter and epidemiologist, both from New Haven, win MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant" award

Two Connecticut residents are among the 25 MacArthur Scholarship winners, the "Engineering Grants", which include a prize of $ 635,000 unconditionally.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has been awarding scholarships annually since 1981 to scientists, artists, economists, pastors, journalists and dancers, who are free to do whatever they please with prizes. six figures. The foundation only asks that they continue to do their creative work.

Titus Kaphar, a painter from New Haven, and Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and HIV / AIDS activist, were among the 25 winners announced Thursday. Yale is the link between the two; Kaphar graduated from his School of Art in 2006 and has exhibited in academic art galleries. Gonsalves is a faculty member at Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School.

Kaphar is president and founder of NXTHVN, an artistic incubator that he plans to open in a former machining facility located on Henry Street in New Haven. With NXTHVN – "Next Haven" – Kaphar said in a video distributed by the MacArthur Foundation that he hoped to invite "artists coming out of a graduate program to come live in New Haven to the years they are here, engage in the community. "

Kaphar's paintings, many of which are superimposed, torn or peeled to reveal underground motifs, have been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, MoMA PS1 and the Harlem Studio Museum. In the video, he described a project in the making of the photograph of 97 men who bore the same name as his father and who, like his father, were incarcerated.

Gonsalves co-founded the Global Health Justice Partnership in 2012, a partnership between Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School. He is a faculty member of both institutions, his research straddling human rights activism and epidemiology. He is now trying to reuse the algorithms used to locate hot slot machines in casinos, adapting them to locate areas in the US where HIV is not diagnosed.

For Gonsalves, who learned that he was HIV-positive in 1996, "this quest is personal," he said in a video. "It's not a career. It's a passion and it's the work of my life. "

In 2017, Tyshawn Sorey, an experimental musician and Wesleyan teacher, was honored by the MacArthur Foundation, who described him as "a virtuoso percussionist and a guitarist fluent in piano and trombone … an ever-curious explorer of the the nature of sound and rhythm, the behavior of the ensemble and the physicality of the live performance. "

Below is a list of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellows for 2018:

Matthew Aucoin: Composer, Conductor and Artist in Residence, Los Angeles Opera.

Julie Ault: artist and curator in New York.

William J. Barber II: Pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church, Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Clifford Brangwynne: Biophysical Engineer and Associate Professor at Princeton University.

Natalie Diaz: Associate Professor, Department of English, Arizona State University.

Livia S. Eberlin: Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin.

Deborah Estrin: Computer scientist and professor in the computer science department of Cornell Tech.

Amy Finkelstein: Health Economist, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vijay Gupta: First violin, Los Angeles Philharmonic, co-founder and Artistic Director of Street Symphony.

Becca Heller: Lawyer in New York and co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Raj Jayadev: Co-Founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug, San Jose, California.

John Keene: Writer, Department of African American and African Studies, Rutgers University.

Kelly Link: A writer from Northampton, Massachusetts.

Dominique Morisseau: Playwright, Signature Theater, New York City.

Okwui Okpokwasili: Choreographer and performer, New York City.

Kristina Olson: Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington.

Lisa Parks: Professor, Comparative Media Studies and Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rebecca Sandefur: Jurist, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois.

Allan Sly: Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University.

Sarah T. Stewart: Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and Planets at the University of California at Davis.

Wu Tsang: Filmmaker and performance artist in New York.

Doris Tsao: Neuroscientist and Professor of Biology, Division of Biology and Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology.

Ken Ward Jr .: investigative reporter, Charleston Gazette-Mail, West Virginia.