Anna Schuleit ’93

In 2006 artist Anna Schuleit ’93 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (also known as a “genius grant”), for which she received $500,000 over five years. Using music, flowers, and grasses, Schuleit creates site-specific installations that bring abandoned places back to life. MacArthur describes her as a commemorative artist.

After leaving NMH, Schuleit went back to Germany to finish her baccalaureate, then returned to the States to go to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she majored in painting. Her first major installation, Habeas Corpus, was completed in 2000; inspired by a visit to the abandoned and crumbling Northampton State Hospital—a former mental institute—as an NMH student, Schuleit arranged to broadcast Bach’s “Magnificat” from the windows to hundreds of listeners below. Since then she has created several equally impressive and logistically complex works. Most recently Schuleit has returned to the studio to paint.