Garrett Bradley is a 2025 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant, better known as the MacArthur “Genius Award.” The $800,000 grant is meant to foster Bradley’s career as an innovative filmmaker who has been lauded for her blend of experimental technique and her devotion to authenticity. Bradley was one of 22 recipients this year.
Bradley was born in New York City in 1986, and has made movies in New Orleans for more than a decade. Her 2014 film “Below Dreams,” was a study of the challenges faced by three 20-somethings making their way in the Crescent City. The New York Times review of “Below Dreams,” noted Bradley’s “impressionistic style” and her use of “mostly nonprofessional actors.”
In 2020, her full-length documentary “Time” followed the struggles of a woman raising a family while seeking the release of her husband who was serving a 60-year sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Bradley won the Sundance Film Festival’s US Documentary Directing Award for “Times,” become the first Black woman to earn the title.
Garrett Bradley, ‘America’ (film still), 2019
Bradley directed the “Live in the All Along” episode of the television series “Queen Sugar.” Her films have appeared in the 2015 Prospect.3 Arts Biennial, New Orleans’ bygone international art exhibition, and at The New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as in prestigious exhibitions across the country.
According to the MacArthur Foundation website, Bradley “harnesses the full potential of moving images to evoke feeling and render the textures of her subjects’ lives.”
The MacArthur Foundation grant program was established in 1981, and, according to the foundation website, is meant to reward “exceptional creativity,” the “promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments which could be enabled by our support,” and the “potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”
Twenty-two artists, authors, and scientists were awarded the grant this year. They hail from all over the United States.
New Orleans and Louisiana have produced their share of MacArthur fellows in recent years.
Louisiana-born poet Jericho Brown won the Genius Grant in 2024. Composer and Tulane University professor Courtney Bryan and Loyola University law professor Andrea Armstrong, an incarceration law scholar, won the award in 2023.
New Orleans sculptor John T. Scott received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1992.
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