The MacArthur Foundation has named mixed-media artist Christine Sun Kim among the 20 recipients of its 2026 MacArthur Fellowship. The award, informally known as the "genius grant", provides each fellow with USD 800,000 in unrestricted funding distributed over five years. Artists Rodney McMillian, Chip Thomas and Vincent Valdez are also among this year's fellows, who were chosen across disciplines ranging from writing and the arts to science and teaching. Born in California in 1980 and based in Berlin, Kim has been Deaf since birth. She initially hoped to study graphic design, but enrolled instead at the School of Visual Arts in New York, earning a BFA in 2006, after learning that no university courses offered the interpreters she needed. She went on to complete an MFA in sound and music at Bard College in 2013. From the start of her career she has drawn on her own experience as a Deaf person to examine how communication is negotiated across cultures. Her practice first gained wide attention through drawing: at the 2019 Whitney Biennial she presented the series Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018-19), a set of charcoal illustrations articulating her frustration at the barriers she encountered inside cultural institutions. She received the Ford Foundation's Disability Futures Fellowship in 2020. Since then her work has expanded into performance, music and interactive installation, frequently deploying dry humour to raise awareness of Deaf issues and to probe the social, cultural and bodily relationships people hold with language and sound. Kim's work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2013), the Shanghai and Berlin Biennales (both 2016), the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2021), the Secession in Vienna (2023), the Gwangju Biennale (2023) and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (2026). Kristen Mack, the foundation's vice president for communications, said past fellows had "defied boundaries by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress". The foundation described Kim as an artist exploring "the political, cultural, and multisensory dimensions of sound, spoken language, and communication".