Ithaca College

Writing Professor Catherine Taylor has been awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. The MacDowell Colony, founded in 1907, is the oldest artists' colony in the United States. Their mission is to nurture the arts “by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination.” Over 6,000 writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and composers have attended including Leonard Bernstein, Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, James Baldwin, and more recently Alice Walker, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Michael Chabon. The MacDowell Colony was honored with the National Medal of Arts — the highest award given by the United States to artists or arts patrons — for “nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists” and offering them “the opportunity to work within a dynamic community of their peers, where creative excellence is the standard.”