Christine Sun Kim, who earned her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2006, has been named one of 20 recipients of the 2026 MacArthur Fellowship, SVA announced on October 5, 2026. The fellowships, widely known as genius grants, carry an unrestricted $800,000 award paid out over five years. Kim, born deaf and based in Berlin, has built an international reputation for translating sound into visual and conceptual form. Her practice spans drawings, large-scale murals, video and participatory installations that foreground how deaf people navigate a world organized around spoken communication. Early works include the participatory installation Game of Skill 2.0 from 2015, which made listening a physical task for gallery visitors, and the Degrees of Deaf Rage drawings of 2018-19, charting frustration with hearing-centered systems through geometric angles. More recent projects include the mural Prolonged Echo (2023), which renders the American Sign Language sign for echo in sweeping black forms, and Ghost(ed) Notes (2024), scattering musical notation beyond the staff to ask what disappears in communication. Her current solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, titled Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock, uses vinyl murals and an arched OLED screen to create an immersive spatial environment. Kim's work has appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA in New York, Vienna Secession, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum, among others. She follows a line of SVA-affiliated MacArthur recipients that includes photographer Dawoud Bey, writer and illustrator Lauren Redniss and artist Sarah Sze.