Creativity plays an essential role in ushering in a more equitable and inclusive society. MacArthur Fellows have led movements to combat inequality and unjust systems, developed astonishing works of socially engaged art, and offered new narrative frameworks for understanding our society and its complex history.
What is the role of creativity in advancing equity? What can we learn locally in Chicago and what can we share nationally?
Join the Chicago Commitment, Journalism and Media, and MacArthur Fellows programs for a conversation with Fellows who work to advance equity in the areas of arts and culture, media & storytelling, and justice.
Welcome
Geoffrey Banks, Senior Program Officer, Chicago Commitment, MacArthur Foundation
Opening Remarks
Juan Salgado, MacArthur Fellow, community leader, MacArthur Foundation Board of Directors, and City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor
Juan Salgado is City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor. His career has focused on improving education and economic opportunities for residents in low-income communities. As Chancellor, he oversees Chicago's community college system, serving more than 70,000 students across seven colleges. Under his leadership, City Colleges has worked to remove barriers to college access, strengthen program quality, and enhance student supports to create pathways to upward mobility. Previously, he served as CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, where he worked to empower residents of Chicago’s Southwest Side through education, citizenship, and skill-building programs that led to sustainable employment and economic stability. He is also a member of the board of the Obama Foundation. Juan was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015.
Juan was elected to the Board in 2020. He is a member of the Audit Committee, the Committee on Impact Investments, and the Institutional Policy Committee.
Panelists
sujatha baliga, MacArthur Fellow, attorney, and restorative justice practitioner, interrupting criminalization and breaking cycles of recidivism and violence.
sujatha baliga’s work is characterized by an equal dedication to people who’ve experienced and caused harm and violence. A former victim advocate and public defender, sujatha is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and conferences about her decades of restorative justice work. She also speaks publicly and inside prisons about her own experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse and her path to forgiveness.
In her most recent position directing the Restorative Justice Project, sujatha helped communities across the U.S. implement restorative justice alternatives to youth criminalization. Today, she is exploring restorative justice approaches to ending intimate partner and sexual violence.
A 2019 MacArthur Fellow, her personal and research interests include the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts, survivor-led anti-carceral movements, restorative justice’s potential impact on ending racialized mass criminalization, and Buddhist approaches to conflict transformation. She’s a member of the Gyuto Foundation in Richmond, CA, where she leads meditation on Monday nights. sujatha makes her home in Northern California with her partner of 26 years and their 17-year-old child. She is writing her first book.
Nicole Fleetwood, MacArthur Fellow, art historian, and curator, exploring art by incarcerated people.
Nicole Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. She is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies.
Nicole is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, and several other prizes. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration. The exhibition was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by The New York Times and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic.
Nicole’s other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which was the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. She is represented by Janklow & Nesbit and is finishing a nonfiction book titled Between the River and Railroad Tracks that will be published by Little, Brown.
Sky Hopinka, MacArthur Fellow, artist and filmmaker, developing new forms of cinema that center Indigenous worldviews.
Sky (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media.
Sky’s work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography.
Stanley Nelson, MacArthur Fellow, documentary filmmaker.
Stanley Nelson is today’s leading documentarian of the African American experience. His films combine compelling narratives with rich historical detail to shine new light on the under-explored American past. Awards received over the course of his career include five Primetime Emmy® Awards, and lifetime achievement awards from the Emmys and IDA. In 2013, Nelson received the National Medal in the Humanities from President Obama. In 2019, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool was nominated by the GRAMMYs for Best Music Film and went on to win two Emmy® Awards at the 42nd Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
Nelson’s 2021 documentary Attica, for SHOWTIME Documentary Films, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards® and earned him the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary. Also in 2021, Nelson directed the feature film Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy for Netflix, which was a 2022 duPont-Columbia Awards Finalist, and Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre, with co-director Marco Williams, for the HISTORY Channel, which was nominated for three Primetime Emmy® Awards. Nelson also executive produced After Jackie for the HISTORY Channel in 2022 about the generation of Black baseball players who came after Jackie Robinson. Nelson’s latest film, Sound of the Police, co-directed with Valerie Scoon and produced with ABC News Studios, was released on Hulu in August 2023.
In 2000, Mr. Nelson, and his wife, Marcia Smith, co-founded Firelight Media, a nonprofit organization that provides mentorship, funding, and artist development opportunities to emerging documentary filmmakers of color. In 2008, Nelson and Smith co-founded Firelight Films, a production company focused on making documentary films and developing strategies, partnerships, and materials to reach and engage diverse audiences.
Moderated by Lauren Pabst, Senior Program Officer, Journalism & Media, MacArthur Foundation.
Closing Remarks
Daniel Ash, President, Field Foundation
Daniel Ash is president of the Field Foundation of Illinois, where he is responsible for helping Field achieve its mission—centering racial equity to achieve community empowerment through Art, Justice, Media & Storytelling, and Leadership Investment. Annually, Field, along with its strategic funding partners, distributes more than $6.5 million in grants to organizations working to address systemic issues in Chicago's divested communities.
Prior to being appointed president at Field, Daniel served as associate vice president of Community Impact for The Chicago Community Trust, where he was responsible for creating the Building Collective Power strategy to help advance equitable neighborhoods within underinvested communities through grantmaking to community organizing, storytelling, and resident-driven initiatives.Previously, Daniel served as the Trust’s chief marketing officer with responsibility for directing brand strategy and communications, and for spearheading the development of On the Table, an ongoing civic engagement and dialogue platform designed to center and amplify resident voices and create greater civic connectedness across the Chicago region. Before joining the Trust, Daniel spent 10 years as vice president of Chicago Public Media where he was responsible for the organization’s two largest revenue categories—corporate sponsorship and individual giving—and led double-digit growth during his tenure. He was a key voice in shaping Chicago Public Media’s overall strategic focus.
Daniel earned his MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and a BA in Economics from Oberlin College. He also completed a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Princeton University.
Reception to follow.