Category: Black Excellence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity_Roxx

Divinity Roxx (b. 1976) is a two-time Grammy-nominated American recording artist, producer, composer, musician, and author. She was born Debbie Walker to parents Beverly Walker and Raymond Walker Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia. She legally changed her name to Divinity Roxx in 2006.^[1][2][3]

Divinity’s work includes elements of funk, rock, and hip-hop.^[4] She has released five solo albums on her record label, IRoxx Entertainment (Ain’t No Other Way – 2003, The Roxx Boxx Experience – 2012, ImPossible – 2016, Ready Set Go! – 2021, World Wide Playdate – 2024). Both of her children’s music albums were nominated for Grammy Awards.^[5][6]

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/bryan-washington

Bryan Washington is a fiction writer capturing the fragile beauty of modern relationships in stories shaped by place, memory, and the quiet rituals of daily care. His novels and short stories feature queer men of color and their inherited and chosen families as they live alongside one another—sometimes gently, sometimes painfully. He writes in a style that is deceptively spare, and he develops characters primarily through dialogue marked by awkward silences and questions left unanswered. Across a short story collection and three novels, Washington offers a vivid and compassionate vision of how people stumble home to one another.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/chip-thomas

Chip Thomas is a public artist transforming overlooked and neglected spaces into powerful public works grounded in community histories and present-day experiences. Most of Thomas’s works are sited on the Navajo Nation and made in collaboration with the Diné People. He began his artistic work during his 36-year career as a primary care physician on the Navajo Nation. The ethos of care and healing from his medical practice is also evident in his artistic practice, particularly those works that confront the legacies of colonial violence and environmental degradation.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/rodney-mcmillian

Rodney McMillian is an artist exploring how history and socioeconomic conditions determine experience and belonging in the United States, and particularly in the American South. His practice extends across media—installation, sculpture, painting, video, and performance—and he often incorporates thrifted domestic objects like blankets, sheets, carpets, old mattresses, and broken furniture into his work. His conceptual sculptures and installations gesture toward the social and policy forces that perpetuate economic marginalization.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/trajal-harrell

Trajal Harrell is a choreographer and dancer bringing different dance traditions into dialogue with each other and creating speculative moments of coexistence and interaction. Harrell transforms extensive research about dance history into what he calls a “fictitious archive,” in which the geographic, temporal, or social barriers that separated dance styles, cultures, and artists are suspended in the collective imagination. In his explorations of Japanese butoh, minimalism, modern and postmodern dance, and other performance practices, he shows how bodies can express multitudes of historical possibilities and counter-histories.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/maaza-mengiste

Maaza Mengiste is a fiction writer depicting the moral and personal harms of political conflict in works that render both the intimate textures of individuals’ lives and the broad sweep of historical events unfolding around them. She grounds her novels in extensive research and inhabits multiple historical and fictional voices, offering complex, sometimes competing, accounts of periods of violence in twentieth-century Ethiopia.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/ellora-derenoncourt

Ellora Derenoncourt is a labor economist and economic historian uncovering the historical roots of racial disparities in wealth and economic mobility in the United States. For her research on labor market standards, wage inequality, and economic policies, Derenoncourt builds innovative datasets and leverages real-world historical events as starting points of inquiry. She is identifying the key policies and drivers of ongoing gaps in earnings and accumulated wealth between Black and White Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Easley

Annie Jean Easley (April 23, 1933 – June 25, 2011) was an American computer scientist who contributed significantly to the beginning iterations of NASA‘s rocket technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel

John Cameron Urschel Jr. (born June 24, 1991) is a Canadian mathematician and former professional football guard.^[1][2] He played college football at Penn State and was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL draft. Urschel played his entire NFL career with Baltimore before announcing his retirement on July 27, 2017, at 26 years old.

Urschel has bachelor’s and master’s degrees (both from Penn State) and a PhD (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), all in mathematics.^[3][4] Urschel is also an advanced statistics columnist for The Players’ Tribune. He served a three-year term on the College Football Playoff selection committee which began in the spring of 2020,^[5] and is an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern_Hunt

Fern Yvette Hunt (born January 14, 1948) is an African American^[1] mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology.^[2] She currently works as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she conducts research on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems.^[3]

Hunt was born in New York City on January 14, 1948, to Daphne Lindsay and Thomas Edward Hunt. Her sister, Erica Hunt, is a published poet and author. Hunt’s grandparents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica before World War I.^[4][2] Her family lived in a primarily black housing project in Hampton. Her father did not graduate from high school, and though her mother attended Hunter College for two years, she did not earn a degree. When Hunt was 9 years old, her mother gifted her a chemistry set for Christmas, which sparked her early interest in science. Hunt’s middle school science teacher, Charles Wilson, further encouraged Hunt to pursue math and science.^[2][5] Hunt attended the Bronx High School of Science, and it was during her time in high school that her primary focus shifted from science to mathematics.^[6] After graduating high school, Hunt attended Bryn Mawr College following the encouragement of her mother, earning an A.B. in mathematics in 1969.^[4] She went on to earn a master’s degree and PhD in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University in 1978.^[7] Her PhD thesis (1978) Genetic and Spatial Variation in some Selection-Migration Models was advised by Frank Hoppensteadt.^[4]