MacDowell National Benefit

About our Honoree

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.

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