Two ‘Genius Grant’ winners come out of Miami and each gets a $625,000 fellowship

This year’s MacArthur Fellows — recipients of the popularly known “Genius Grant” — feature two winners from Miami that really sing.

One, literally, as Grammy-winning jazz singer and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant has been impressing demanding jazz audiences with the sound of her four-octave voice and power of her songs for years.

“When I learned I was a fellow, the initial reaction was shock, doubt, fear they’d made a mistake, impostor syndrome but ultimately, elation,” Salvant said in an email to the Miami Herald.

The other local fellow, Damien Fair, is a cognitive neuroscientist who really knows what makes the brain sing. Fair has been devising maps of network connectivity in individual brains to advance the understanding of how distinct regions of the organ communicate and develop.

“It took me a second to realize what was going on,” Fair said in an email after he learned of his selection. “But after that, joy, and a lot of humility. I work with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, many of who are deserving of such an award. So, it is very humbling, to be honest.”

Salvant and Fair are among the 21 recipients of the 2020 MacArthur Fellows honors announced Tuesday. The Miami-born duo are joined by engineers and writers, scientists and sociologists, artists and scholars, filmmakers and environmentalists.

In the words of MacArthur’s managing director Cecilia Conrad, the recipients have shown “exceptional creativity in their artistic, intellectual and professional pursuits, which help resolve historical issues, refine knowledge and improve the world for everyone.”

“In the midst of civil unrest, a global pandemic, natural disasters, and conflagrations, this year’s class of 21 exceptionally creative individuals offers a moment for celebration. They are asking critical questions, developing innovative technologies and public policies, enriching our understanding of the human condition, and producing works of art that provoke and inspire,” Conrad said.

How ‘Genius Grants’ are given

The MacArthur Fellows Program presents each recipient with a “no strings attached” stipend of $625,000, paid in equal quarterly installments over five years.

The nominees are reviewed by an independent selection committee of individuals in the arts, sciences and humanities professions, as well as for-profit and nonprofit fields for their achievements and creativity. The winners are then selected by the president and board of directors of the MacArthur Foundation.

The honors are revealed in the fall and can number from 20 to 30 each year. Since the first ones in 1981, there have been 1,061 recipients of the “Genius Grants.”

Meet Miami’s MacArthur honorees

Cécile McLorin Salvant, 31, was returning to her hometown triumphantly in 2018 when she gave a concert at downtown Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. By that point, Salvant, who grew up in Pinecrest, had won two Best Jazz Vocal Grammy awards for her albums “For One to Love” (2016) and “Dreams to Daggers” (2018). She would win a third, in 2019, for “The Window.”

She told Artburst Miami at the time that growing up in South Florida, where she sang with the Miami Choral Society’s children choir at 8, fueled her curiosity.

“Being around immigrants and other cultures made me want to know more about the world,” Salvant said. Her mother, Lena McLorin Salvant, founder of the French-American School in Miami, is French Guadeloupean. Her father, Alix, a physician, was born in Haiti.

“There is something to be said about growing up with friends that had all kinds of backgrounds. I have this closeness with Latin American culture,” Salvant told the Miami Herald in 2019. “My mom lived in Cuba and the Dominican Republic so she speaks Spanish perfectly. My aunt lived in South America for years, she lived in Argentina, I went there for two months as a kid.”

At 13, and at Carver Middle School, Salvant wanted to be a classical music singer. After graduating from Coral Reef High School in South Miami-Dade, she moved to France and enrolled at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory of Music in Aix-en-Provence.

That’s where jazz took hold.

In 2010, Salvant won first place in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Since 2012, she has based her career out of Brooklyn.

Conrad said Salvant was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow for putting all of her experiences into her art.

“Cécile offers innovative interpretations of jazz standards as well as imaginative original compositions,” Conrad said. “She is inventive in her delivery — verbally, musically, and tonally. She is bold with respect to her repertoire and is a brave experimentalist.”

Salvant said winning the fellowship is a testament to the teachers, colleagues, family, and friends who have supported, taught and challenged her over the years.

“It is an unbelievable honor, an encouragement to be bolder, to study more, to find ways to help others flourish on a greater scale, with more focus,” she said. “I have been working on an animated feature length musical film, exploring representation, the evolution of the black figure in American culture, and cycles of appropriation. This award will give me the ability to expand on these themes in my work and through collaboration with educators and community leaders to create educational material and media for public schools.”

Fair, 44, was selected as a MacArthur fellow, Conrad said, because his pioneering research on the brain could help scientists further understand how the complex organ functions.

“Fair’s research using functional magnetic resonance imaging helps us better understand brain development in both typical and atypical contexts. Through his enhancements to the accuracy of functional magnetic resonance imaging, we are learning more about how distinct regions of the brain communicate with each other and showing how unique patterns of connectivity exist in individuals,” she said.

Fair, a neuroscientist with the University of Minnesota Medical School, moved from Miami to Minnesota with his mother when he was a child. He has recently been studying how the brain perceives Black and white faces to investigate the effects of race and emotional context on face perception, the OHSU Brain Institute reported.

“We need to embrace ‘variability’ — our diversity — and provide access to this pursuit to all of the talents that exist in our society,” Fair, a graduate of Yale University School of Medicine and Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, said in his MacArthur biography.

“It could be argued that the driving factor of discovery and advancement of nearly every civilization has been the result of human variability, where some outlier, often times being of minority status, pushed the society in a way that no one could have ever imagined,” Fair said. “Ironically, in the sciences, our ability to proportionally value the importance of this principle has been limited. I am hopeful, at this critical juncture in our history, we can harness our privilege and awareness to embrace a change of course.”

Winning the “Genius Grant,” Fair told the Miami Herald, “is validating in some ways with regard to our approach to characterizing developmental brain health, but really every essence of our work is a culmination of the relationships and science that we’ve done with my peers. It feels very much as if this award is for all of us doing developmental cognitive neuroscience.”