The 2009 Stranger Genius Awards issue, with profiles of this year's winners, hits streets November 12th. This year's geniuses are Jeffry Mitchell (art), Zia Mohajerjasbi (film), Stacey Levine (literature), The Cody Rivers Show (theater), and Pacific Northwest Ballet (organization).

The Stranger Genius Awards is a cross between the MacArthur Grants and Publisher's Clearinghouse: Every fall since 2003, we have given a check for $5,000 and an obscene amount of attention to four artists and an arts organization. Sometimes we reward achievement. Sometimes we reward promise. Sometimes we reward big institutions. Sometimes we reward shoestring guerrilla groups. Sometimes we reward people who need the money. Sometimes we reward people who don't.

There is no application process. A panel of Stranger editors goes to a private boxing gym and conducts their deliberations while sparring. Winners are notified via cake. The $5,000 comes with no strings attached.

Past Genius Parties

1. 2008 at The Moore Theater
2. 2007 at Central Library
3. 2006 at Henry Art Gallery
4. 2005at Seattle Art Museum
5. 2004at Western Bridge
6. 2003at Consolidated Works

2008 Geniuses

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  Wynne Greenwood (Visual Art)

  Makes: Videos, sculptures, performances, music, and alter egos, often in a single work of art. Used to Want to Be:… Read profile »

  
  
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  Lynn Shelton (Film)

  Has made movies about: Girls, boys, wilderness, the past, anal sex. Has, in the name of Derring-Do: Worked on a… Read profile »

  
  
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  Sherman Alexie (Literature)

  By the End of the Year Will Have Finished: 24 Books in 16 Years. Is Also Considering: Founding an online… Read profile »

  
  
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  Implied Violence (Arts Organization)

  Are not afraid of using: Fake blood, live chickens, fresh produce, intimidation tactics, buildings no one else is using. Are… Read profile »

  
  
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  Paul Mullin (Theater)

  Writes plays about: Science, death, radiation sickness, sex, amnesia. Has had them produced in: New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Louisville,… Read profile »

  
  

2007 Geniuses

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  Alex Schweder (Visual Art)

  In one of Schweder's installations, titled Still-Life of Beefsteak and Cheese and owned by the Tacoma Art Museum, a video screen is set into a wall covered in red-and-yellow striped wallpaper scented like donuts. The wall is like food; it draws you close and makes you salivate. It also is an organism with a window into its digesting intestines: The glistening video footage is made from a colonoscopy wand poking around in Jell-O. Read profile »

  
  
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  Amy Thone (Theater)

  Watching Amy Thone act for the first time is startling, even a little unpleasant. You realize all the puffed-up, empty acting you've been putting up with—you didn't know it could be so tight, dense, and good. And, forever after, seeing Thone walk onstage is cause for quiet celebration and relief. She saves inferior productions from themselves, not least at Seattle Shakespeare Company, where she works as a casting director. Read profile »

  
  
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  Linas Phillips (Film)

  Perhaps the best thing about Phillips's work is the methods he finds to inject humor into the gravest situations. The best device in Walking to Werner is the use of commentary tracks by Werner Herzog—from DVDs of Herzog's films—about the search for "ecstatic truth." Laid over the inevitably punier quest of Linas Phillips trudging to Los Angeles in a floppy hat, the appropriated commentary vacuums out any trace of pretension, at once exulting and undercutting the trials you see onscreen. Read profile »

  
  
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  Heather McHugh (Literature)

  Many of McHugh's poems are startling stories that could be published as paragraphs, as prose, although she doesn't take to the suggestion. "I like lines," she told me, and then paused and said, "She snorted." Her lines are packed and bright and good, and they like space. They have a way of meaning more than you think, of going deeper than you can see. Read profile »

  
  
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  Strawberry Theatre Workshop (Arts Organization)

  Politically, the ground on which STW stands is socialist. The kinds of plays that the company produces have this defining theme: The world is not as it ought to be. And the reason why the world is perverted, upside down, is because the best of humanity is continually challenged and undone by the worst of humanity. But since its inception, the plays that STW has done have not been obviously didactic—they've been artistically brilliant. Read profile »

  
  
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  Cary Moon (Bonus! Political Genius)

  Moon's political genius is her ability to see the long-term picture; when others laughed at her for supporting what many called a ridiculous, long-shot option, Moon ignored them. While leaders bickered over whether to replace the viaduct with a larger viaduct or expensive tunnel, Moon quietly bided her time, consciously threading the needle between the two opposing positions. Then came last March's vote against both waterfront freeway options. That "no/no" vote was a major victory for Moon and others who supported the surface/transit option. Read profile »

  
  

2006 Geniuses

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  Lead Pencil Studio (Visual Art)

  All of their sculptures, drawings, and installations are reductive, but they aren’t clearing out room for some bland blank Zen thing, aren’t disappearing into some pseudo-spiritualist fog. They restore narrative to geometry and geography, and bodies to buildings and places. They make art that lives in the same world as we do. They turned what would have been a tourist’s eye-glazing afternoon at Maryhill into a conflict, an investigation, and ultimately a duplication of the compulsion to create despite blatant resistance. Read profile »

  
  
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  Jennifer Zeyl (Theater)

  A Zeyl design is conceptually robust, beautiful, efficient, which is not to say minimal. Finer Noble Gasses needed a trashed New York apartment. Zeyl didn’t just build a facsimile of squalor—she built a cluttered, stinky mess you could live and get scabies in. She has an intelligence and a gale-force will that most of her peers, in large and small theater, lack. Her seeming bossiness is a symptom of deep drive—the work is too important for screwing around. Read profile »

  
  
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  James Longley (Film)

  Iraq in Fragments is often called cinema vérité, but when you watch the film you don’t get the sense you’re seeing reality unimpeded. Instead, you feel that you’re seeing Iraq through the eyes of individual Iraqis. Their vision of and for their country are, perhaps needless to say, wildly divergent. Presciently organized in three separate chapters—Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish—Iraq in Fragments is the best movie yet about the Iraq war. And it was made by a Seattle filmmaker. Read profile »

  
  
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  Jonathan Raban (Literature)

  Jonathan Raban has made a career of feeling awkward. He’s curious, funniest when he’s miserable, and quick to put himself in uncomfortable situations, to be at a loss, to see what happens. “I’m not a sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea,” he writes in 1999’s Passage to Juneau, almost all of which takes place at sea. Read profile »

  
  
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  On the Boards (Arts Organization)

  What’s important to remember is the daunting risk involved in virtually everything On the Boards does. For a less adventurous organization, programming contemporary performance might entail little more than providing the stage for critically acclaimed dance troupes, solo performers, and experimental theater acts on the national tour circuit. Programming for On the Boards is a much swampier affair, featuring equal parts research, gossip, and dumb luck. That such a formula regularly results in dazzling performance events is a testament to On the Boards’ instincts, intelligence, and—yes—genius. Read profile »

  
  

2005 Geniuses

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  Sutton Beres Culler (Visual Art)

  In Three-Day Weekend, a cluttered trailer home with a transparent floor suspended above crowds at ConWorks, a different volunteer family made it their home every night. For five-hour stretches the people inside watched TV, played games, microwaved food, made out, chased the cat, peed—all while a rapt crowd stood below, gawking. People wanted to watch but didn’t want to want to watch—a conflicted state of voyeuristic compulsion and self-disgust—and each night the show was more crowded than the last. Read profile »

  
  
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  Gabriel Baron (Theater)

  Over the summer of 2005, Gabriel Baron briefly played a pinball. It was the ideal role for one of Seattle’s most gifted actors. Whether stretched out like a board or bunched up like a potato bug, Baron has the force and direction of a vector. The strength of his impersonation lies in the sort of paradox that sustains all fascinating performers: Gabriel Baron makes for a highly disciplined clown. He lets us glimpse the control behind the slapstick and the purpose beyond the hilarity. Read profile »

  
  
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  Michael Seiwerath (Film)

  Michael Siewerath’s passion for the art form—especially in regard to building a vital filmmaking community here in Seattle—is limitless. Now a decade old, Northwest Film Forum, under Seiwerath’s direction (he joined the organization in 1996 and was promoted to executive director in 2000), has blossomed into the leading film organization in the city, offering not just screenings of underappreciated and little-seen films, but also hands-on training, equipment rentals, and outright film production. Read profile »

  
  
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  Rebecca Brown (Literature)

  When others write, they steer clear of the things that Rebecca Brown’s prose purposely runs into—certain words in a certain order that produce disturbing and distorting echoes and phantoms. This type of language thrives in all of Brown’s work and marks the very condition—the genius—of her literary imagination. Read profile »

  
  
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  Frye Art Museum (Organization)

  A year ago, everyone knew where the Frye Art Museum was coming from: the past. Then something happened. The unassuming building on First Hill, where admission has always been free, underwent a psychic and aesthetic transformation. Read profile »

  
  

2004 Geniuses

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  Victoria Haven (Visual Art)

  “Visual artist Victoria Haven wore a dress, which I'm told is notable; the writer John Olson wore sneakers, as predicted. Filmmaker David Russo said in an acceptance speech that he was glad to get the money but felt "conflicted" about the award because he doesn't always agree with The Stranger's movie reviews. And actress Sarah Rudinoff, who was off doing a show most of the evening, accepted her award by way of a burqa-draped proxy who drank, issued fatwas, and generally tried to offend everyone...” Read profile »

  
  
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  Sarah Rudinoff (Theater)

  Sarah Rudinoff is one of maybe 10 performers in town who have achieved the distinction of local stardom in non-rock-band live performance. She sings like a demon, equally comfortable belting rock, jazz, or blues. Her comic timing is unmatched. So is her capacity for unexpected pathos. Rudinoff is not the kind of actress who “disappears” into the roles she plays. She’s the kind of actress who explodes out of her roles with heroic, instinctive, and fearless performances. Read profile »

  
  
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  David Russo (Film)

  David Russo creates short films that are fits of live action and animation, rapid in their editing, and beautifully designed. Populi (2002), which is on permanent display at the newly monikered Qwest Field, is an ambush set to Holst’s “Mars: Bringer of War,” involving a carved wooden human shape, a steel sphere, and travels not just around the globe but possibly into other dimensions. Russo can assemble images in his head and transport those images to film like few can. He’s truly blessed. Read profile »

  
  
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  John Olson (Literature)

  In one sense, Olson’s poems are like a rush of literary history. It’s easy to find surrealist influences, as well as the influence of Beat poetry, language poetry, Gertrude Stein. There is something athletic and ruthless about the way Olson does so many things at once, as well as something strangely at ease. His writing is fully experimental and full of experience. It has range and urgency and poise. It’s wild. Read profile »

  
  
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  Seattle School (Organization)

  With Iron Composer—part Fluxus-informed composition experiment, part booze-fueled demolition derby, in which a pair of songwriters raced to compose and perform new songs in one hour while adhering to a strict drinking schedule (one shot every nine minutes) while being tormented by the audience—Seattle School achieved the near-miraculous: forging an unprecedented alliance between experimental performance and rock ‘n’ roll mayhem. Seattle School’s genius is for diabolically crossbreeding braininess and brazen theatricality. Read profile »

  
  

2003 Geniuses

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  Susan Robb (Visual Art)

  The sculptures—bio-worlds that Robb photographed through a macro lens (so that the tiny worlds appear monumental)—are a sly overlay of fact and fiction, an artist’s rendering of genetic samples, spores, and other microscopic views. In Robb’s work, life is suggested in places you might not think to look. It is a motion against taking for granted what is offered us by way of limits, or what science tells us is true, or what is sold to us in the many guises that things are sold. Read profile »

  
  
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  Chris Jeffries (Performance)

  With a wicked wit and a singular vision, composer Chris Jeffries creates alterna-musicals for a new millennium. His mix of camp and frenzy led to a jubilant aesthetic, which collaborate Allison Narver, artistic director of Empty Space Theatre, described as “community theater on acid: a huge cast, every rule of ‘well-made theater’ was broken, and it was wild, theatrical, incredibly stupid, and tons of fun.” Read profile »

  
  
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  Web Crowell (Film)

  With found objects and a camera, filmmaker Web Crowell creates a vision of a junk empire. His first feature-length effort, Borrowing Time, is an entertaining, inspired, and beautifully constructed work, one that successfully captures the lost era of B movies and Flash Gordon serials. Or, as he describes it, “The distillation of everything I love about preposterous and outdated sci-fi, sentimentally crammed into a cacophony of ungainly props, stop-motion animation, and things dangled on wire.” Read profile »

  
  
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  Matt Briggs (Literature)

  Matt Briggs has an almost provocative lack of interest in the majesty of the Northwest. It is an underhanded and brilliant snub to the way the Northwest has been marketed to us that Briggs seems completely uninterested in it. In The Remains of River Names, Briggs demonstrates a profound investment in the interiors of outwardly repulsive people, and in his second collection of stories, Misplaced Alice, he demonstrates an uncommon interest in the possibilities of style. Read profile »

  
  
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  Vital 5 (Arts Organization)

  The genius of Greg Lundgren’s Vital 5 Productions is that it realizes and exploits art’s social aspect, by gathering us together to cheerfully upset some pretty deeply (however unconsciously) held notions about art and the art world. Most every show at Vital 5 has some goofy but still profound undercurrent: art that you can’t see, art by fictional artists, portraits of critics. The point is that everything you take for granted about the art world is a construction and is therefore up for grabs. Read profile »

  
  
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  Velocity Dance Studio (Arts Organization)

  Perhaps Velocity’s most telling program is the Bridge Project, which commissions work from three choreographers, gives them dancers and three weeks of rehearsal space, and presents the results. But these choreographers can’t use dancers they’ve worked with before. This restriction encourages relationships with dancers new to the scene, like those fresh graduates from Cornish and the University of Washington that founders KT Niehoff Michele Miller had watched slipping off to New York. Read profile »