Vanessa Lyon Awarded MacDowell Fellowship
Visual arts faculty member and director of the Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS), Vanessa Lyon has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship for the Fall/Winter 2022-2023 residency period.
Lyon has received this fellowship in the Nonfiction category, in support of her memoir, a work in progress provisionally titled Blackness Thirteen Ways: On Finding Myself in Art History. Lyon plans to participate in the residency this fall.
"Joining the MacDowell community as I work through this project is the best gift I can imagine. So many people I respect have made transformative art and writing in that very special setting," said Lyon.
MacDowell's mission is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination. They encourage applications from artists representing the widest possible range of perspectives and demographics, and who are investigating an unlimited array of inquiries and concerns.
The Admissions Department at MacDowell received 2,967 applications for the Fall/Winter 2022-2023 residency period, a number for a single application cycle that exceeded all previous annual totals. The number of Fellowships awarded annually remains unchanged, at approximately 300.
Previous MacDowell fellows from the Bennington community include faculty and staff members Ben Anastas, April Bernard, Nick Brooke, Elena Demyanenko, Thorsten Dennerline, Camille Guthrie, Rage Hezekiah, Chelsea Hodson, Sherry Kramer, Mary Lum, Alice Mattison, Ann Pibal, among others across varying disciplines.