2025 MacDowell Presents at Hotel Chelsea
Thank you to our supporters and board members who joined us for our MacDowell Presents end-of-year event at Hotel Chelsea. We were honored to welcome director of the Academy Award–winning The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, and director of the Academy Award–winning O.J.: Made in America, Ezra Edelman, in conversation about their careers, creative journeys in Hollywood, and the vital importance of trusting their instincts as filmmakers.
With perfect cadence and insight, the evening was expertly moderated by Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times critic Salamishah Tillet, who guided a thoughtful discussion on confidence, intuition, and staying true to one’s vision as a director.
About MacDowell Presents
Inspired by MacDowell’s Chairman’s Evening, started by bestselling author and former Board Chair Michael Chabon, this signature event exemplifies MacDowell’s mission to shine a light on the impact that art can have on society. The intimate gathering features luminary artists and the type of unscripted, interdisciplinary discussions that happen over dinner every night between artists-in-residence on MacDowell’s 450-acre New Hampshire campus – the place James Baldwin affectionately referred to as a “sanctuary for writing.”
Our speakers
Ezra Edelman, Brady Corbet, and Salamishah Tillet (Amir Hamja photo)
Ezra Edelman is a directed and producer best known for O.J.: Made in America, which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. He has produced and directed three films for HBO, including the Peabody Award-winning Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals. His storytelling features some of the most iconic figures in sports through projects such as The Luckiest Guy in the World, which follows basketball phenom Bill Walton; Seau, an exploration of the rise and fall of one of the greatest linebackers the NFL has ever seen, Junior Seau; and Cutie and the Boxer, the story of famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and his wife. He also produced the news magazine show Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Additionally, Edelman has covered a wide range of social and cultural problems facing Americans in producing TV series including Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas and The Loving Generation.
Brady Corbet is an award-winning writer, director, and actor whose bold, uncompromising work has firmly established him as one of the most visionary auteurs of his generation. His feature directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), is a haunting and ambitious historical drama starring Academy Award nominees Bérénice Bejo and Robert Pattinson. The film premiered to international acclaim, winning both the Orizzonti Award for Best Director and the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Film at the Venice Film Festival. Corbet followed with Vox Lux (2018), which further established his reputation for daring, genre-defying cinema. His most decorated feature, The Brutalist (2024), starring Academy Award winner Adrien Brody and Academy Award nominees Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce, premiered in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival where he won the Silver Lion for Best Director. The film became one of the most decorated films of the decade, winning three Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and four BAFTA Awards, among many others. Most recently, he co-wrote and produced The Testament of Ann Lee with Mona Fastvold which premiered in official competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, where it was picked up for world-wide distribution by Searchlight Pictures. As an actor, Corbet has worked with some of the most revered filmmakers of the 21st century, such as Michael Haneke, Ruben Östlund, Noah Baumbach, Gregg Araki, Lisa Cholodenko, and Antonio Campos. His performances are known for their intelligence, depth, and fearlessness across a wide range of genres and styles. Brady Corbet continues to expand the possibilities of cinematic storytelling — with a body of work defined by artistic rigor, emotional intensity, and radical vision.
Salamishah Tillet is the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large at The New York Times. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece. Tillet is currently completing the book All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made. Her writing has also appeared in Aperture, The Atlantic, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Time, and her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2025, she received the Emerson Collective Fellowship and Gordon Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing. In 2003, she and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, founded A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women.
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