2026 GENIUS AWARD WINNERS
Actualize AiR
Category: Visual Art
Betty Wetter & Tush
Category: Performance
It’s hard to overstate how much Anastacia-Reneé has given to Seattle’s literary community. For decades, she’s been writing, teaching, mentoring, curating, performing, and generally showing up—on stages, in classrooms, at readings, in workshops, and for generations of other writers. She served as Seattle Civic Poet, was a poet-in-residence at Hugo House and a Jack Straw curator, and has remained a prolific artist in her own right: writing books, poetry, fiction, plays, and making work that spills across literature, performance, film, and visual art. Anastacia-Reneé has been a teacher, friend, collaborator, champion, and creative force for so many people in this city; this award is long overdue.
Beacon Cinema
Category: Film
Chef Lisa Bi
Category: Food
Anastacia-Reneé
Category: Literature
Den Tapes/ Kay Redden
Category: Music
Actualize Artist in Residence is only two years old, but it’s already become a vital piece of Seattle’s arts ecosystem. The women-run, artist-led organization is home to 35 artists (and counting), providing affordable studio spaces, community, and a place for artists to make work in a city where space to create is increasingly hard to come by. Actualize is building a model for what a sustainable artistic life in Seattle can look like, and is exactly the kind of ambitious, community-minded experiment we want to see more of in this city.
The Beacon Cinema does so much for an arthouse theater of this size. Co-owners Tommy Swenson and Shayna Nowicki are master curators with top-notch taste, showing obscure, cult, foreign, and newly restored films you often can’t see anywhere else (if you’re lucky, the owners, or someone from their lovely staff, will introduce a screening and explain why they chose it, context for the film, and/or what makes it worth seeing). This is a theater run by people who are genuinely obsessed with cinema, and the kind of small, deeply considered cultural institution that makes Seattle a much more interesting place to live. As they put it, “The time for cinema is always now.”
For the past eight years, Betty Wetter and TUSH have presented a continually sold-out variety show at Beacon Hill’s Clock-Out Lounge, featuring some of Seattle’s favorite queens (“a conservative’s worst nightmare!“). Regular performers Miss Texas 1988, Pussy Willow, Beau Degas, “drag goblin” Angel Baby Kill Kill Kill, Moscato Sky, Amora Namor, Stasia Coup + DJ Dark Wiley bring an underground, avant-garde flavor to drag, and there’s simply nothing else like it in town. But Betty’s genius doesn’t begin and end onstage. In 2024, she co-founded the Queer Sick Pay Fund with Shane Donohue and Elby Brosch of Drama Tops, creating a safety net for queer nightlife workers that also supports gender-affirming care. TUSH makes Seattle way more fun, and Betty works hard to make it a better place to be a queer artist.
Chef Lisa Bi is a perpetual motion machine of very good ideas. Between her two Vietnamese pop-ups, she gets to show off two totally different sides of her brain: At Béo Béo Bakery, she flexes her pastry skills with playful breakfasts, sweets, and baked goods, and at Ba + Mẹ, she focuses on Vietnamese home cooking—the kinds of dishes you’re less likely to find on restaurant menus in the US. And then she starts messing with the boundaries between all of the above, turning chả trứng hấp into a Hot Pocket-style hand pie, Vietnamese chicken curry into a pot pie, and chè thái into cheesecake. Chef Bi takes Vietnamese flavors, comfort food from her hometown of Atlanta, family food, serious technique, and an extremely fun imagination and keeps finding new ways to put them together. Lucky for Seattle, Chef Bi's imagination seems to have a bottomless appetite.
For more than a decade, Kay Redden has been a tireless champion of Seattle music. Through her cassette label, Den Tapes, she’s released more than 100 records by local bands, documenting a large swath of the city’s punk, indie, experimental, shoegaze, and generally harder-to-classify music. She’s also the force behind Den Fest, an annual celebration of how much excellent music this city is making. At a time when it’s increasingly difficult to keep independent music infrastructure alive, running an independent record label while remaining deeply invested in the local scene is commendable. We couldn’t be more thrilled to show our appreciation of everything she’s built.