Ten disciplines. One year. A permanent record.
The first class of Latimer Laureates was named at Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York. Their citations are read into the Register and into the documentary record.
The Class of 2027
The first laureates, in their own disciplines.
The citation is short on purpose. The work is the long form.
- 01Sciences & Mathematics
Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett-Helaire
For viral immunology that became the scientific spine of the mRNA vaccine, work that altered the trajectory of a pandemic and the future of medicine itself.
Read the dossier → - 02Sciences & Mathematics
Dr. Ayanna Howard
For a body of robotics and human-centered AI scholarship, and for leadership as President of Spelman that has redrawn what an HBCU institution can be.
Read the dossier → - 03Letters & Thought
Dr. Ruha Benjamin
For the moral architecture of Race After Technology, an argument that has reshaped how a generation reads code as policy.
Read the dossier → - 04Design & Architecture
Ed Welburn
For four decades at General Motors, the first Black design chief of a global automaker, and a quiet shaper of the everyday object.
Read the dossier → - 05Music & Sonic Arts
Wynton Marsalis
For a lifetime in the American canon, Pulitzer, nine Grammys, and the construction of Jazz at Lincoln Center as a permanent institution.
Read the dossier → - 06Cinema & Image
Ryan Coogler
For films that re-set the grammar of American cinema, Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, and an authorship that holds form and conscience together.
Read the dossier → - 07Technology & Engineering
Lanny Smoot
For more than a hundred patents and a career of theatrical engineering, Disney Research Fellow, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Read the dossier → - 08Social Architecture
Robert F. Smith
For the Student Freedom Initiative, the Morehouse pledge, and a decade of philanthropic architecture that has rewritten the economics of Black education.
Read the dossier → - 09Mentorship & Stewardship
Ann M. Fudge
For governance at the highest levels of American enterprise, and for a four-decade practice of mentorship that has produced a generation of leaders.
Read the dossier → - 10Arts
Kara Walker
For a body of visual work that has forced the American eye to see its own history, from the cut-paper silhouette to the Turbine Hall.
Read the dossier → - 11World Changer Innovation
Aicha Evans
For engineering leadership at Intel and Zoox, and for delivering the first purpose-built American robotaxi into public service, a template for the mobility of the next century.
Read the dossier →
The Register
A record kept beyond a lifetime.
Each laureate enters the Latimer Register, a printed and digital record co-stewarded with Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian. The Register is not a list of winners. It is a working archive: a citation, a long-form conversation, a film portrait, a deposited object, and the public papers that surround the work.
The Register is read aloud, in full, at every Convocation. The reading takes longer each year. That is the design.
Adjacent
Attend the ceremony where the record is made public.
The Convocation at Cooper Hewitt is where each citation is read aloud.
The Ceremony