The MacArthur Foundation announced this morning their annual “genius” grants of $625,000 no-strings attached funding. Njideka Akunyili Crosby was among those who received the award.

The MacArthur Foundation made a brief YouTube video interview with the artist where she explains the grounding and ambitions of her work.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a figurative painter whose large-scale works express the hybridity characteristic of transnational experience through choices of subject matter, materials, and techniques. […] In her explorations of the complexities of forging identity in a globalized society, Akunyili Crosby is developing an inventive yet accessible representational strategy for understanding culture and history from multiple viewpoints all at once.