Name Anna Schuleit Age: 32 Work: Painter, installation artist Location: Brooklyn, NY Famous Quote: "The last thing I want to do is make psychiatric patients feel violated for suffering from an illness they have no control over. to feel violated for suffering from an illness that they have no control over."

German-born artist Anna Schulte went from anonymous to Einstein virtually overnight, thanks to a phone call announcing her winning a $500,000 2006 "Genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation. One of the youngest recipients of the award, Schuette is committed to turning unexpected places, from hospitals to small islands, into oversized "canvases." While working on "Habeas Corpus," she wired an abandoned mental hospital to play Bach music and asked former patients to tell their stories She also asked former patients to tell their stories. For Bloom, she laid a carpet of 28,000 flowers at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Now a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, Schuette uses art to celebrate those who are often overlooked.

Q: Your art style is very unique, what do you call it? A: There is a field called oral history, where people tell their life stories in their own words. What I would like to be is a visual history collector.

Q: Habeas Corpus was a 28-minute music installation in a former mental hospital. How did it work? A: The idea was to make the building "sing," to turn the abandoned structure into a musical instrument by filling the cavities and voids inside the building with voices, much like you would use the internal cavities of a guitar or violin. I chose recordings of Bach's Magnificat and played them through strategically placed speakers so that the music seemed to stream in through the windows and doors.

Q: Why were you interested in psychosis? A: There is a saying, "The degree of civilization in a country can be measured by how it treats its weakest citizens." I have always been drawn to telling the stories of those citizens.

Q: $500,000 is a lot of money! Has your approach as an artist changed? A: As a visual artist, there are many ways to survive. You can do another job or you can use your work as a source of income. If I had signed a contract with a gallery it would have been easier, but I also wouldn't have been able to work "under the radar" for long periods of time when I needed to work without outside influence. I was more or less broke, $10,000 or $11,000 a year, poverty level in New York State.

Q: Tell us about your next project in Boston Harbor. A: The setting is an uninhabited island, but like an old piece of leather, it has layers and layers of signs of human use. The installation uses glass and reflective surfaces to tell the story of the island's former inhabitants.

To learn more about Schuleit's work, log on to anna-schuleit.com.www.macfound.org.