UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts alum and multi-disciplinary artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen has been named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow.

Nguyen, 49, is one of six artists and 22 total recipients this year to win the prestigious award.

The annual fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant,” honors individuals the MacArthur Foundation describes as “extraordinarily creative” with a “track record of excellence.” Fellows who are anonymously nominated and selected by an independent committee receive a no-strings-attached stipend of $800,000.

Nguyen graduated with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from UC Irvine in 1999 and is the third MacArthur fellow to come out of the university since the award’s inception in 1981; previous MacArthur Anteaters are hydroclimatologist A. Park Williams in 2023 and conservation biologist Russel S. Lande in 1997.

“We’re thrilled to see Tuan Andrew Nguyen recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship,” Department of Art Chair Kevin Appel said in a statement. “Tuan’s work embodies the spirit of critical imagination that defines our department, weaving together art history and activism into profoundly moving narratives. His commitment to storytelling as a form of repair and resistance has inspired so many of our students and colleagues. This recognition is deeply deserved.”

A multi-disciplinary artist whose films and sculptural works interrogate the lasting effects of violence, displacement and colonialism, Nguyen’s practice draws on the experiences of communities grappling with the intergenerational traumas of war, from Vietnam and Senegal to Papua New Guinea and the United States.

Nguyen’s family fled the Vietnam War as refugees by boat from Saigon in 1979. Nguyen was just 3 years old when he left his birthplace to live in Texas, later moving to Long Beach and then the Vietnamese diasporic community in Irvine, where he shared a two-bedroom apartment with 10 others.

When Nguyen first started at UC Irvine in the late 1990s, he thought he’d become a doctor, he told The Orange County Register in an interview earlier this year. He took a few casual art courses with the hopes of sharpening his medical school application. His career plans were thwarted when he discovered an abiding interest, guided by idols like Daniel J. Martinez, an artist whose work explores topics of race and sociopolitical boundaries within American society.

Following graduation from UCI, Nguyen received a master’s from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. He also moved back to Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, that year to study under his grandmother, a poet.

Upon his return to Vietnam, he was inspired by the graffiti scene; one of his first documentary projects followed the evolution of the street art in the “paradoxical land where communist propaganda and capitalist advertising battle for command of the visual landscape,” he said.

Nguyen also co-founded the cross-disciplinary art collective The Propeller Group and, more recently, he helped put together Sàn Art, an independent artist space in Ho Chi Minh City.

Nguyen continues to shape the global dialogue around art, identity and postcolonial history. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Some of Nguyen’s works include “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming,” “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon” (2022) and recently, “Strike” (2025), a spherical sculpture made from pounded brass of artillery shells, which he worked in the garage of his mother’s Irvine home.

“The concept of generational memory and trauma is very real,” Nguyen said. “It’s where my exploration begins.”