A painter, a playwright, and a forensic anthropologist: Brooklyn wins big in this year’s Macarthur Foundation awards.

In addition to Park Slope’s Joan Snyder, playwright Lynn Nottage got the call (and $500,000) as did Mercedes Doretti, a Forensic Anthropologist, working in Brooklyn and Buenos Ares. Her work, according to the foundation,  "unearths evidence of crimes
against humanity and seeking justice on behalf of populations whose
immense losses have been omitted from the historical record."

Here’s what the foundation had to say about Lynn Nottage:

Lynn Nottage is an original voice in American theater, a playwright
whose entertaining and thought-provoking works address contemporary
issues with empathy and humor.  Her ambitious, expressive early works,
including Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Mud River Stone, and Por’Knockers,
reveal Nottage’s rich poetic imagination as she portrays periods of
American history from unexpected vantage points and crafts complex
characters of a kind that have garnered little notice among other
writers and historians.  Her more recent works, Intimate Apparel and Fabulation, are considered to be her most accomplished thus far and represent major artistic achievements.  Intimate Apparel,
a prize-winning drama, is the story of a young black seamstress in
early 20th-century New York, a woman working her way through the social
confines of her time – predicaments that continue to haunt us today.
Nottage’s imaginative exploration of history, her ability to find
resonance in unexpected moments in the past, and her sensitive
evocation of social concerns have made her a powerful voice in
theater.  She is a dramatist who will continue to provide us with
provocative plays in which her characters confront some of society’s
most complex issues.