Paul Rucker is a visual artist, composer, and musician. His work often integrates live performance, sound, original compositions, and visual art, and focuses on issues surrounding incarceration. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Rucker has received grants and awards from organizations including Creative Capital, MAP Fund, and Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2016, he received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, for which he was the first artist in residence at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Rucker has participated in residencies at MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, Banff Centre, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy, among others. From 2013-2015, he was the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Artist-in-Residence and Research Fellow at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Rucker is currently an iCubed Visiting Arts Fellow embedded at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. He served as a panelist in Pew Fellowships in 2017.