Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier Awarded Prestigious MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship

Photographer and video artist LaToya Ruby Frazier has been awarded the MacArhtur Fellowship, a prestigious unrestricted fellowship granted to individuals who have shown originality and dedication in their creative pursuits. Each recipient is awarded a "no-strings-attached" stipend of $625,000.



33-year-old Frazier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a B.F.A. from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. She has held artist residencies at the Lower Manhattan Culture Council and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. The crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, forms the backdrop of her images, which make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue—largely by necessity—to live amongst it.