MacDowell National Benefit
Honoring Komal Shah
Art Collector and Philanthropist
Gotham Hall, New York City
Thank you for joining us at Gotham Hall on October 28th for the MacDowell National Benefit, our annual celebration and gathering with MacDowell artists, supporters, board members, and friends. This year's Benefit, hosted by actor-writer-producer and MacDowell Fellow Sharon Washington (24), featured dinner, drinks, a paddle raise, and the awarding of the 5th annual Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award to our Honoree Komal Shah, art collector and philanthropist. The evening also featured performances and testimonials from MacDowell Fellows Missy Mazzoli (09, 11, 13), Hernan Diaz (19), and Haleh Liza Gafori (24). When guests left Gotham Hall, they were encouraged to take home books written by Fellows from their tables, and were given small seed packets which contained heirloom seeds from century-old plants on the MacDowell campus that were planted by Marian MacDowell in the early 1900’s.
Nearly 350 guests joined us and thanks to the incredible generosity of those in the room and beyond, we raised over $925,000 in support of artist residencies for the over 300 Fellows that come to MacDowell each year!
If you missed the opportunity to donate or know someone who wants to join us in supporting art and artists, please make your commitment today. Your contribution will help us meet our Benefit fundraising goal and make this MacDowell Benefit the first ever to raise $1 million. You can give via our website or contact development@macdowell.org for more ways to give.
About our Honoree
Originally from Ahmedabad, India, Komal Shah migrated to the U.S. in 1991 to study computer science in California. After completing her master's at Stanford, she obtained an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, eventually holding positions in the executive suites of Oracle, Netscape, and Yahoo. In 2008, Shah left the tech industry to focus on philanthropic pursuits. She then began developing the Shah Garg Collection with her husband and tech entrepreneur Gaurav Garg, solidifying a vision for the collection’s emphasis on women artists in 2014. Today, they are focused on amplifying the voices of women artists and artists of color through the Shah Garg Foundation.
Learn more about Shah's work and the Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy award in our press release.
Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award
The Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award was created to honor those who profoundly and uniquely support artists, aligning with our founder Marian MacDowell’s legacy and her championship of artists as they create bold new works that spark our imagination, illuminate our world, and celebrate our humanity.
In 2020, the inaugural award was presented to Ava DuVernay and ARRAY, a multi-platform media company and arts collective based in Los Angeles that amplifies independent films by Black artists, people of color, and women filmmakers globally. In 2021, the award was presented to Mahogany L. Browne and Urban Word NYC, one of the oldest and most comprehensive youth literary arts organizations in the country. In 2022, MacDowell Fellow and founder of Anonymous Was A Woman, Susan Unterberg, was presented with the award for her advocacy and philanthropy around gender equity in the arts. In 2023, Fairfax Dorn, co-founder and artistic director of Ballroom Marfa, was honored with the award for her life-long commitment to supporting and centering artists’ needs.
About our Host
Sharon Washington (24) is proud to be a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. While at MacDowell, Sharon worked on her new play, A Colored Mirror, based on true events that occurred in New York City in 1917: the performances of the first all African-American cast on Broadway in a dramatic production. The project was awarded a 2024-2025 Princeton University Library Research Grant.
Celebrating her new career journey as a writer and over 30 years as a working actress, Sharon received a TONY nomination in 2023 for Best Book of a Musical as co-writer of New York, New York. She made her playwright debut at City Theatre with the world premiere of her solo show Feeding The Dragon, which subsequently played at Hartford Stage, and Off-Broadway at Primary Stages. Nominations included Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, and won an Audelco Award for Solo Performance. Sharon was Primary Stages 2017-18 Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence. Feeding The Dragon is also a best-selling Audible Original audio play published by Oberon Books.
Sharon continues to perform on stage, and on the big and small screen. Recent film and television appearances include Sing Sing, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, The Kitchen, Bull, the Academy-Award winning Joker film, and Joker 2: Folie à Deux. Sharon has extensive Broadway and Off-Broadway credits, including The Scottsboro Boys (Lyceum Theater), Dot (Vineyard Theater), Wild with Happy (Public Theater/NYSF), for which she received a Lucille Lortel nomination and an Audelco Award, Richard III (Public Theater/NYSF, 1990 and 2022), Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Caucasian Chalk Circle (Public Theater/NYSF), While I Yet Live, String of Pearls (Primary Stages), and many regional theater credits.
About our Fellow Performers and Speakers
Hernan Diaz (19) is the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 books of the year and Literary Hub’s twenty best novels of the decade. Trust, one of The New York Times’s 100 best Books of the Century, was translated into more than thirty languages, received the Kirkus Prize, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Diaz’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Haleh Liza Gafori (24) is a translator, vocalist, poet, and composer born in NYC of Iranian descent. Her acclaimed book Gold, translations of poems by the 13th century mystic and sage Rumi, was published by New York Review Books in 2022. Her 2nd volume of translations Water will be released in 2025, also on NYRB Classics. A 2024 MacDowell fellow and recipient of the 2023 NYSCA grant, Gafori performs and teaches across the country and abroad at universities and venues such as Stanford University, Sarah Lawrence College, St Joseph’s University, the Academy of American Poets’ online literary seminars, Lincoln Center, Le Poisson Rouge, Bradford Literary Fest, the Women’s Library in Istanbul, and elsewhere. Her cross-media performance piece weaves translations, original text, and musical compositions and debuted at the New York Public Library. Gafori’s work has been published by Columbia University Press, Harvard Review, Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, and featured on various podcasts including Padraig O’Tuama’s Poetry Unbound and Poetry for All. Gafori lives in Brooklyn and is currently working on a book of original poems.
Three-time Grammy® nominee Missy Mazzoli (09, 11, 13) was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (NY Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY). Her music has been performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, Scottish Opera, Norwegian National Opera, the New York Philharmonic and many others. In 2018 she became one of the first two women, along with Jeanine Tesori, to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera. She has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Opera Philadelphia. Upcoming commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, Chicago Lyric Opera and the Edinburgh International Festival. In 2016, along with composer Ellen Reid, she founded Luna Composition Lab, a non-profit that supports female and non-binary composers in their teens. She teaches composition at Bard College and her works are published by G. Schirmer.
Benefit Committee Co-Chairs
Laura and James Colony
Fairfax Dorn
Darrell and Robin Harvey
Host Committee
Michael Almereyda*
David Baum and Terry Reeves
Eleanor Briggs
Tania and Christopher Carnegie
Rosanne Cash*
Alexander Chee*
Tom Dolby and Spencer Alcorn
Amelia Dunlop and Andrew Krivak
Andrea Elliott*
Joshua Ferris*
Katie Firth and Jonathan Bank
Christine and Todd Fisher
Wendy Fok*
Elizabeth and Russell Gaudreau
Jeannie Suk Gersen* and Jacob Gersen
Andrew Sean Greer*
Tess Gunty*
Evan Hanczor
Penny Brandt Jackson* and Thomas Campbell Jackson
Starlee Kine*
Meaghan Leahy
Samhita Mukhopadhyay*
Shazna Nessa*
Kambui Olujimi*
Jessica Quinn
Vijay Seshadri*
Arabelle Sicardi*
Danyel Smith*
Amy Davidson Sorkin and David Sorkin
Jia Tolentino*
Sam Wathen and Erik Maza
Monica Youn*
*notes MacDowell Fellow or Medalist
**all lists as of 10/18/2024
Thank You to Our Sponsors
Luminary
Christine and Todd Fisher
Darrell and Robin Harvey
Leader
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Eleanor Briggs
Ann and George Colony
Fairfax Dorn
Stephanie Olmsted
Thomas and Barbara Putnam
Andrew and Barbara Senchak
Peter and Catherine Wirth
Patron
Ellen and Ed Bernard
Sarah Garland-Hoch and Roland Hoch
CIBC
Laura and James Colony
Elizabeth and Russell Gaudreau
Christine Gross-Loh
Chiwoniso Kaitano and Andrew Sabl
Penguin Random House, Inc.
Amy Davidson Sorkin and David Sorkin
Advocate
David Baum and Terry Reeves
Gail Carroll
Rick and Jan Cohen
Amelia Dunlop and Andrew Krivak
Karen Fairbanks and Scott Marble
Katie Firth and Jonathan Bank
Gerald and Teresa Gartner
Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob Gersen
Monica and Holcombe Green III
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Campbell Jackson
Anne Stark Locher and Kurt Locher
Stephen and Sue Mandel
Mollie Miller and Robert Rodat
Kyra Montagu
Christine and Garrett Moritz
Nell Painter and Glenn Shafer
F.L. Putnam Investment Management Company
Sean and Heather Ward
Sam Wathen and Erik Maza
Past National Benefits
2023
In 2023, Fairfax Dorn, co-founder and artistic director of Ballroom Marfa, was honored with the fourth annual Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award for her life-long commitment to supporting and centering artists’ needs.
2022
In 2022, Rosanne Cash presented the third annual Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award to Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and its visionary founder, Susan Unterberg, at a festive celebration at Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York.
2021
In 2021, MacDowell celebrated the creative collaborations between MacDowell Fellows and honored Urban Word NYC with the second annual Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award.
2020
In 2020, MacDowell hosted our first-ever virtual National Benefit and awarded the inaugural Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award to ARRAY.
2019
The national benefit at Gotham Hall in New York City in 2019 raised more than half a million dollars for our residency program.
2018
The national benefit at MacDowell's NYC space at 521 West 23rd Street in 2018 raised more than $620,000 for critical operating support.