MCA

 Adam Nathaniel Yauch, better known by his stage name MCA, was a prominent American rapper, filmmaker, and bass player. He was born on August 5, 1964, and grew up in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, where he attended Edward R. Murrow High School. His father, Noel, was an architect, and his mother, Frances, was a social worker. Yauch had a non-religious upbringing despite his mother being Jewish and his father Catholic. During his high school years, he taught himself to play the bass guitar and formed the hip hop group Beastie Boys with John Berry, Kate Schellenbach, and Michael Diamond.

At age 22, Beastie Boys released their first album, Licensed to Ill, on Def Jam Records. Yauch directed many of the group's music videos under the pseudonym Nathaniel Hörnblowér. The group sold 40 million records worldwide by 2010 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. Yauch was inducted posthumously in absentia due to his illness, and his bandmates paid tribute to him by reading a letter he had written to the audience.

Yauch was also an important voice in the Tibetan independence movement, and he established the Milarepa Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Tibetan independence. He organized several benefit concerts to support the cause, including the Tibetan Freedom Concert. Additionally, he founded Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent film production and distribution company based in New York City. Yauch directed many of Beastie Boys' music videos and did much of their promotional photography using the pseudonym Nathaniel Hörnblowér.

Yauch directed the 2006 Beastie Boys concert film, Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! and the 2008 film Gunnin' For That #1 Spot. He produced the comeback album, Build a Nation (2007), from the hardcore/punk band Bad Brains. He also distributed Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Oren Moverman's The Messenger (2009) through Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Yauch was a practicing Buddhist and met his wife, Tibetan American Dechen Wangdu, while attending a speech by the Dalai Lama at Harvard University in 1995. They married in 1998 and had a daughter, Tenzin Losel, the same year. In 1998, during the MTV Video Music Awards, Yauch condemned America's wars in Muslim countries and prejudice against Muslims and Arabs.

In 2009, Yauch was diagnosed with a cancerous parotid gland and lymph node. He underwent surgery and radiation therapy, which delayed the release of Hot Sauce Committee Part Two and the subsequent tour. Yauch became a vegan on the recommendation of his doctors. At the time, Yauch described the cancer as "very treatable." He died at age 47 on May 4, 2012, due to parotid cancer.

In his last will and testament, Yauch left instructions that his music could not be used in advertising, though the legal validity of such an instruction has been questioned. On May 3, 2013, the Palmetto Playground in Brooklyn Heights was renamed Adam Yauch Park in his memory. Yauch was posthumously awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in 2011.