Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
Capezio is the trade name of Capezio Ballet Makers Inc., an American manufacturer of dance shoes, apparel and accessories.
Stanley Plumly was an American poet and the director of University of Maryland, College Park's creative writing program.
Jan T. Vilček is a Slovak-American biomedical scientist, educator, inventor and philanthropist. He is a professor in the department of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, and chairman and CEO of The Vilcek Foundation. Vilček received his M.D. degree from Comenius University Medical School in Bratislava in 1957; and his Ph.D. in Virology from the Institute of Virology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, in 1962.
Susan Marshall is an American choreographer and the Artistic Director of Susan Marshall & Company. She has held the position of Director of the Program in Dance at Princeton University since 2009.
Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist and writer. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first book was published in 2007, he has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012.
The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions to the United States, and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences. The foundation's flagship programs include the Vilcek Foundation Prizes, which recognize and support immigrant contributions to American arts, biomedical science, and society. The foundation is also the designated steward of the art collection assembled by founders Jan and Marica Vilcek, comprising holdings in American modernism, Native American pottery, pre Columbian objects, and contemporary art.
Jonah Bokaer is an American choreographer and media artist. He works on live performances in the United States and elsewhere, including choreography, digital media, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and social enterprise.
Dancer and choreographer Ronald K. Brown founded the dance company Evidence in New York in 1985. Brown's work incorporates modern dance, Senegalese Sabar and other West African movement vocabularies, Afro-Caribbean dance, and contemporary urban dance from around the world. He has choreographed numerous works for his own company, as well as for Philadanco, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, the Maimouna Keita West African Dance Company, and many others. Brown has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bessie Award, a Black Theater Alliance Award, and an Audelco Award for the choreography of Regina Taylor's musical Crowns. He has also been a guest artist at The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts. He studied dance with Mary Anthony.
Donna Uchizono is an American choreographer.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a spoken-word poet, dancer, playwright, and actor who frequently directs stand-alone hip-hop theater plays.
Emily Johnson is an American dancer, writer, and choreographer of Yup'ik descent. She grew up in Sterling, Alaska and is based in New York City. She is artistic director of her performance company, Emily Johnson/Catalyst. Johnson is a organizer for the First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking. She has worked part-time at Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore owned by author Louise Erdrich.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Peter Burr is an American digital and new media artist. He specializes in animation and installation. He was also a touring member of the collective MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE; and founded the video production company, Cartune Xprez. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Nanfu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. Her debut film Hooligan Sparrow premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017. Her second film, I Am Another You, premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2017 and won two special jury awards, and her third film, One Child Nation, won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Wang is the recipient of a 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking, from the Vilcek Foundation.
Martyna Majok is a Polish-born American playwright who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living. She emigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New Jersey. Majok studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard School. Her plays are often politically engaged, feature dark humor, and experiment with structure and time.
Desdemona Chiang is a Taiwan-born American theatre director, and co-artistic director of Azeotrope in Seattle, Washington. Her directing credits include the Guthrie Theater, Alley Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Repertory Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, Playmakers Repertory Company, and ACT Theatre. She directs in a variety of genres, including Shakespeare, new plays, and musicals.
Ibrahim I. Cissé is an Nigerien-American biophysicist. He is currently director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. Previously, Cissé was at the California Institute of Technology as Professor of Physics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Professor of Physics and Biology. He has won several awards for his work, including in 2021 the MacArthur Fellowship.
Franziska Michor is an Austrian computational biologist. She is a professor in the department of data science at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. She serves as Director of the Physical Sciences-Oncology Center and the Center for Cancer Evolution.
Harmit Singh Malik is an Indian American evolutionary biologist who is a professor and associate director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He was awarded the 2022 Genetics Society of America Edward Novitski Prize.
