Macarthur 'Genius' Grant fellows: Here are this year's 25 winners of $625,000 prize

The list of MacArthur “Genius” Grant fellows has been released, with this year’s list of recipients including experts in the arts, science, and public information among those who made the cut.

The fellows, named annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, includes 25 individuals and experts in their fields who the foundation has determined show exceptional “originality, insight and potential”.

"Working in diverse fields, from the arts and sciences to public health and civil liberties, these 25 MacArthur Fellows are solving long-standing scientific and mathematical problems, pushing art forms into new and emerging territories, and addressing the urgent needs of under-resourced communities. Their exceptional creativity inspires hope in us all," Cecilia Conrad, the managing director of the MacArthur Fellows Programme, said in a statement.

The grant comes with a no-strings-attached $625,000 award, which is distributed to the fellows over a five-year period.

Here are this year's fellows:

Matthew Aucoin, 28, is a composer and conductor who works with the American Modern Opera Company and Los Angeles Opera. He is based in New York.

Julie Ault, 60, is an artist and curator who lives in New York.

Reverend William J Barber III, 55, is a pastor and civil rights activist who lives in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Clifford Brangwynne, 40, is a a biophysical engineer at Princeton University.

Natalie Diaz, 40, is a poet who works at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Livia S Eberlin, 32, is an analytical chemist who works at the University of Texas-Austin.

Deborah Estrin, 58, is a computer scientist at Cornell Tech in New York State.

Amy Finkelstein, 44, is a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gregg Gonsalves, 54, is an epidemiologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Vijay Gupta, 31, is a violinist and speaker with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Becca Heller, 36, is a human rights lawyer with the International Refugee Assistance Project in New York.

Raj Jayadev, 43, is a community organiser with Silicon Valley De-Bug in San Jose, California.

Titus Kaphar, 42, is a painter with NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut.

John Keene, 53, is a writer who works at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey.

Kelly Link, 49, is a writer who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Dominique Morisseau, 40, is a playwright with the Signature Theatre in New York.

Okwui Okpokwasili, 46, is a choreographer and performer in New York

Kristina Olson, 37, is a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Lisa Parks, 51, is a media scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rebecca Sandefur, 47, is a sociologist and legal scholar at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne.

Allan Sly, 36, is a mathematician at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Sarah T Stewart, 45, is a planetary scientist at the University of California-Davis in Davis, California.

Wu Tsang, 36, is a filmmaker and performance artist in New York.

Doris Tsao, 42, is a neuroscientist at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Ken Ward Jr, 50, is an investigative journalist with the Charleston Gazette-Mail in Charleston, West Virginia.