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23 unusual facts about National Endowment for the Arts


Andy Statman

On June 19, 2012, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Andy Statman would be awarded a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Arnold Franchetti

During his 45 years in the United States, Franchetti received composition honors and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and many other prestigious organizations.

B. George

In 1980, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce recordings by visual artists, and in 1981 released Laurie Anderson’s first single “O Superman”.

Benny Carter

Carter was a member of the music advisory panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Bill Moring

In 1986, Moring began studying with the legendary Rufus Reid, thanks to a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Brian O'Doherty

For many years, O'Doherty was an influential member of the senior staff of the National Endowment for the Arts, first as director of the Visual Arts Program, and subsequently as director of the Media Arts Program, where he was responsible for the creation of such major public television series as American Masters and Great Performances.

Chitresh Das

Pandit Das has also received numerous grants including from the Olympic Arts Festival, National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, California Arts Council, Rockefeller Foundation, Irvine Fellowships in Dance, among others.

Flory Jagoda

In 2002 she received a Lifetime Honor by the National Heritage Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts for her efforts in passing on the tradition of Ladino music.

Gertrude Rosenthal

Gertrude Rosenthal held honorary doctorates from Goucher and the Maryland Institute College of Art and was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jack Walrath

Walrath has received composition grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Composition Grant and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, and performance grants from the NEA and Quad City Arts.

Jack Wilkins

Wilkins was awarded an NEA grant in recognition of his work with the guitar.

Joe LaBarbera

LaBarbera is also on the faculty of the Bud Shank Jazz Workshop in Port Townsend, Washington, has also served on the National Endowment for the Arts council in Washington, D.C., and has been a guest at many other colleges as both performer and lecturer.

Larry Ridley

Ridley served as chairman of the Jazz Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and was the organization's National Coordinator of the "Jazz Artists in Schools" Program for five years (1978–1982).

Ljuskrona

In 1988, the Folk Art section of the National Endowment for the Arts awarded a grant for the implementation of a survey to document the use and styles that existed in the United States.

Lucas Awards

The Lucas Awards are given out by the Cuban Institute for Radio and Television, an institute of the Cuban government and so - in U.S. terms - can be compared to a mix between MTV’s programming and broadcasting influence on the one hand, with the cultural credentials and government recognition of the National Endowment for the Arts on the other.

Nitrate Kisses

Hammer received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to help finance Nitrate Kisses, which was her first feature film.

Public Radio Exchange

The PRX site and services launched in September 2003 after a two-year planning, research, and development phase supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ford Foundation.

Rory Stuart

With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stuart performed and recorded with an expanded version of the original quartet, adding Glenn Wilson, Dannie Moore, and John Stubblefield.

Sitka Fine Arts Camp

In 2004, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts as one of ten exceptional summer arts programs in the country.

Smart City Radio

In addition, she served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation.

The Global Voices Program

Crewdson was awarded a British American Arts Administrative Training Institute Fellowship, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and was the official U.S. representative at Tashkent's First International Theater Festival in Uzbekistan, and has represented the Chicago Artists International Program in Egypt and Turkey, and addressed the United States Sister Cities International delegation in Casablanca Morocco, at the 50th Anniversary celebration of its founding.

Thomas Lorango

He won prizes including the Leventritt Foundation Award, a Young Recitalist's Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the first piano prize at the 1979 G.B. Dealy Awards Competition, and the 1985 First Prize in the Liederkranz Competition.

Wade Mainer

Maple on the Hill, which according to the National Endowment for the Arts was their biggest hit, had originally been composed in the 1890s by Gussie L. Davis.


Allen Shearer

He has received many awards in music, including the Rome Prize Fellowship, the Aaron Copland Award, the Sylvia Goldstein Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship, residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Andrea Fraser

Fraser has received fellowships from Art Matters Inc., the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Anonymous Was a Woman, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Austin Kimble

In 2010, he toured China with Tapestry Dance Company with support from the National Endowment for the Arts as the pianist for the production: The Souls of Our Feet.

Colette Inez

She has published ten poetry collections and has won the Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA Fellowships) and two Prizes and many other awards.

Cora Cohen

Cohen has been a Yaddo Foundation Fellow and the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the NEA, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, and recently, the Edward F. Albee Foundation.

Daria Semegen

In a distinguished academic career in a field still heavily dominated by men, Semegen has received six grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; has been selected as a Fulbright fellow; and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, the Chautauqua Institution, and Yaddo — among a range of other awards and distinctions.

DC Youth Orchestra Program

1968 – Lily Guest, President of the Friends of the Kennedy Center and Walter Anderson, Head of the Music Department of the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) work to prepare for the DCYOP’s first tour

Denman Maroney

He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work and worked on a new soundtrack to go with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Elaine Mayes

Known for her portraits of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury residents in 1967-8 and for her iconic images of rock and roll performers in the late 1960s, Mayes' subject matter has also included landscapes and conceptual projects including her series, Autolandscapes, made with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship from a moving car while traveling across the country in 1971.

Esther Martinez

On September 16, 2006 Martinez was returning home from Washington, D.C., where she had been awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, at a banquet in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress.

Gregg Schlanger

He has received many awards including Sponsorship by the New York Foundation for the Arts, Israel-Tennessee Visual Artist Exchange Project Fellowship, USIA Arts America Grant and New Forms Regional Initiative Grant from the NEA.

Howard Nemerov

Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the first Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Irving Kriesberg

Kriesberg has received two Ford Foundation grants, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Foundation Memorial Award.

Larry Heinemann

Since then Heinemann has received literature fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholarship to research Vietnamese folklore, legends, and mythology at Huế University.

Lee Hyla

Lee Hyla (born August 31, 1952, Niagara Falls, New York) is an American classical music composer who has been the recipient of the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the St. Botolph Club Award, and the Rome Prize.

Leslie Thornton

Thornton has received many awards in the field: the Maya Deren Award, the first Alpert Award in the Arts for media, a nomination for the Hugo Boss Award, two Rockefeller Fellowships, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation and, Art Matters, and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Luis Cruz Azaceta

He has received numerous awards and grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Pollock/Krasner Grant, Penny McCall, New York Foundation for the Arts, Mid-Atlantic Grant for Special Projects and the Cintas Foundation.

Nene Humphrey

Humphrey is the recipient of the Montalvo Artist Fellowship (2012), the Agnes Gund Production Grant for Video (2010), the Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship (2007), the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (1999), the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1986), and the National Endowment for the Arts Artist Grant (1983).

New England Foundation for the Arts

The New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of six not-for-profit regional arts organizations funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and by private foundations, corporations and individuals.

Paola Corso

Corso was also a resident writer for the National Endowment for the Arts WritersCorps in the Bronx where she introduced literary arts in hospitals and senior centers.

Paul Moravec

In addition to his Pulitzer Prize, Moravec has received a Composer Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, and the Charles Ives Prize and Goddard Lieberson Awards in American Composition.

Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Out Loud recitation contest was created in 2006 by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts to increase awareness of poetry through performance and competition.

Radio Bilingüe

Its funders include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The California Endowment, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the California State Health Department - Tobacco Control Section, and many other funding partners interested in informing hard-to-reach, low-income, Latino populations in California and across the U.S.

Richard Toensing

Toensing has received numerous awards for composition most notably from Columbia University (Joseph H. Bearns Prize), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and BMI.

Samuel Hoi

He has juried numerous exhibitions and served on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Surdna Foundation, Wallace Foundation, the DC Commission on Art and Humanities, and the California Community Foundation.

Shari Roman

For the cover of Filmmaker Magazine (USA) she wrote The Genius of the System, a profile of multi-media artist Matthew Barney under an National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant.

Squeaky Wheel Buffalo Media Arts Center

Squeaky Wheel is supported in part by the Baird Foundation, the Children's Foundation of Erie County, the Peter C. Cornell Trust, the Experimental Television Center, the Fund for the Arts, Hodgson Russ LLP, M&T Bank, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the John R. Oishei Foundation, Starbucks Foundation and our members.

Tina Gharavi

Gharavi has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY, where she completed A Town Like Lackawanna, a film about a Muslim/European immigrant community in America post-9/11.

Ursula Mamlok

The recipient of numerous awards, Mamlok had received two National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1974 and 1981), a Fromm Foundation Grant (1994), a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation (1995) and commissions from various organizations, including the Koussevitzky Foundation, Eastman School of Music, Alaria Chamber Ensemble and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Visual Arts Center of Richmond

1994 National Endowment for the Arts Chairwoman Jane Alexander visits in recognition of its Advancement grant to the Hand Workshop

William J. Scherle

After making a very public and national campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts, and in particular its funding of the single-word poem "lighght" by Aram Saroyan, Scherle found himself campaigned against by many of Saroyan's supporters including George Plimpton.