Upper Darby native and saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins is among the MacArthur Foundation’s 20 “genius grant” recipients for 2026, the foundation announced Tuesday.
In more official terms, that makes Wilkins, 29, a MacArthur Fellow — the youngest member of his class. All fellows will receive $800,000 in unrestricted funding over the next five years, with the awards giving financial flexibility to recipients for their artistic and scholarly visions.
Wilkins, in an interview with the Associated Press Tuesday, said he received word that he had been named a MacArthur Fellow while traveling from New York to Philadelphia.
“I was just outside,” he said. “Which was nice because then I could yell as loud as I wanted to and celebrate.”
In a video introducing the 2026 fellows, Wilkins described himself as a saxophonist and composer who anchors “original compositions in history and spirituality.” He added that as a performer, he was “looking to escape the gaze that might be on me and direct my creative energy inwards and upwards.”
Widely considered a leading contemporary jazz musician, Wilkins was joined by jazz great Odean Pope for “RECESS,” an immersive musical experience staged at the Power Market, a former Peco electrical station in North Philadelphia. Pope, 87, and Wilkins met when Wilkins was a young student at the Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, and Pope took him on as a mentee, The Inquirer previously reported.
Presented by Ars Nova Workshop, “RECESS” featured the musicians playing on a stage modeled into a combination playground and bandstand, which Wilkins previously told The Inquirer was a way to inspire “radical play.”
“I started thinking about the landscape of Philadelphia as functioning as a kind of abstracted play space,” Wilkins said in a May interview.
Wilkins’ debut album, Omega, was released in 2020, and connects the 1918 lynching of a pregnant Black woman, Mary Turner, to the 2014 fatal police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown. The abstraction of music, Wilkins told The Associated Press, allows him to represent these stories without “recreating the violence of them.”
“Although it is some of the most painful material, the music itself feels so good,” Wilkins said in the MacArthur Foundation clip.
Most recently, Wilkins released Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. 1, a three-volume live recording of performances at the Village Vanguard, an iconic New York City jazz club.
In addition to Wilkins, two other MacArthur Fellows this year have ties to the Philadelphia area — both of whom are Princeton University professors.
Ellora Derenoncourt, an associate professor in the university’s economics department, told the Associated Press that she would use the award to translate issues of economic justice for the broader public and interested policymakers. And Elizabeth Ellis, an associate history professor, hopes to support research projects focusing Native American History, the university said.
This article contains information from the Associated Press.