Announcing the 2025 Fellows

Jennifer Doudna is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair and a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Doudna is also the founding Executive Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute. Her co-discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering technology, with collaborator, French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, has changed human, animal and agricultural research forever. This genome-editing technology enables scientists to change or remove genes quickly, with a precision only dreamed of until now. Labs worldwide have re-directed the course of their research programs to incorporate this new tool, creating a CRISPR revolution with huge implications across biology and medicine. In recognition of this work, Doudna and Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doudna is also a leader in public discussion of the ethical and other implications of genome editing for human biology and societies, and advocates for thoughtful approaches to the development of policies around the use of CRISPR-Cas9. In addition to the Nobel Prize, has received many other prizes for her discoveries, including the Breakthrough Prize (2015), Japan Prize (2016), the Kavli Prize (2018), the Wolf Prize (2020). In 2015, Doudna was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Photo Credit: Keegan Houser, UC Berkeley

Romare Bearden, a leading twentieth-century painter and collage artist, was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911.  He grew up in New York and Pittsburgh, and his childhood memories of both cities would become frequent subject matter of his art later in life.  Mr. Bearden attended Boston University and graduated from NYU with a degree in education.   He studied art intensively as a student, and later worked as a cartoonist, editor, and art director for several journals and newspapers.   In addition to pursuing his art, Mr. Bearden was a social worker in New York for decades.  In the 1940s he held solo exhibitions in Harlem, downtown New York, and Washington, D.C., one of the few prominent African-American artists to exhibit artwork regularly at the time.   Mr. Bearden was an active part of the thriving intellectual and cultural life in Harlem, and a member of the Harlem Artists Guild, director of the Harlem Cultural Council, and a co-founder of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Cinque Gallery, and the Black Institute of Arts and Letters.   He was also well known as an encouraging mentor for younger artists.  However, his interests extended beyond the visual arts: he was an avid reader and jazz aficionado.  He lived primarily in New York, with a second home in St. Martin, his wife’s native country.  He died in 1988, at seventy-five years of age.

Mr. Bearden’s work drew inspiration from his own childhood in Harlem, and is revered for his poignant illustrations of modern African American life.  His work displays influences ranging from the paintings of Giotto and Picasso to African sculpture and Japanese prints.  Early in his career, he worked reproducing Old Master paintings in black and white using Photostats.  In his examinations of color divorced from form, Mr. Bearden reversed the black and white tones in the works, creating a type of race reversal through picturing dark-skinned rather than light-skinned figures in the famous paintings.   He was at the center of cultural and political life in Harlem, and a founder of Spiral, a group of African American artists committed to communicating civil rights sentiments in their work.  Mr. Bearden’s collages originally began with a proposal for a collective collage initiative with the members of Spiral.  While the group expressed little interest in the idea, he began pursuing the art form seriously on his own, and is perhaps best known for these striking works.   He received particular acclaim for his Projections, large-scale reproductions of his collage works enlarged by using photographic processes. 

Mr. Bearden’s prolific career covered a wide variety of mediums, including oil paintings, collage, drawings, prints, costume design, poster and cover design, mosaics, and tapestries.   He is the recipient of the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York, the National Medal of Arts, and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.  His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Bearden received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970 to work on a book on African-American art history.  The final product, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (Pantheon, 1993), was co-authored with Harry Henderson and published five years after Mr. Bearden’s death.  Mr. Bearden spent over a decade reconstructing biographies, interviewing artists, and tracking down artworks while writing the book, a landmark volume on the history of African American art.  
 

For more information on Romare Bearden:

Romare Bearden at the National Gallery of Art

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and New York Times bestselling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body, a finalist in Autobiography for the National Book Critics Circle. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. As an associate professor at Purdue University, she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction, both in the MFA program and at the undergraduate level.

She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything. She splits her time between Lafayette, IN and Los Angeles. She loves tiny baby elephants.

Profile photograph by Jay Grabiec

As published in the Foundation’s Report for 1941–42:

LANGE, DOROTHEA: Appointed for the making of documentary photographs of the American social scene, particularly in rural communities; tenure, twelve months from June 1, 1941.

Born May 26, 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey. Education:  New York Training School for Teachers, 1914–17; Columbia University, 1917–18.

Investigator-photographer, 1935, California State Emergency Relief Administration; Investigator-photographer, 1935–37, U. S. Resettlement Administration; Photographer, 1935–39, U. S. Farm Security Administration; Photographer, 1940, U. S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

Publications:  An American Exodus, 1939 (with Paul S. Taylor). Contributor of photographs to Land of the Free, 1938.