MacDowell National Benefit

We look forward to welcoming guests to Gotham Hall for our National Benefit on Monday, October 19, 2026. The National Benefit is MacDowell's annual gathering that unites artists, cultural luminaries, philanthropists and institutional partners in celebration and support of the arts.

The evening will feature awards presentations to two individuals who exemplify the kind of leadership and profound, unique support for the arts that aligns with the legacy of MacDowell’s founders. Writer, theatrical producer and longtime Chief Executive Officer of the historic National Black Theatre (NBT), Sade Lythcott will be honored as the 7th annual Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award recipient. Under her leadership, NBT has expanded its role as a vital cultural institution, championing Black artists and strengthening its role as a national advocate for the arts and cultural equity. Renowned artist Amy Sherald will present the award and introduce Lythcott.

Designer, entrepreneur and founder and Chief Executive Officer of Creative Mornings, Tina Roth Eisenberg will receive the 2nd annual Hillcrest Arts Impact Award. Through CreativeMornings, she has built one of the world’s largest creative communities, connecting people across more than 240 cities through events that celebrate creativity, generosity, and human connection. Investor, donor activist, and film and media producer Ruth Ann Harnisch will provide introductory remarks.

The Benefit program will also include dinner, drinks, a paddle raise, and performances and testimonials from MacDowell Fellows. Featured Fellows include bestselling author Nicholas Boggs ('11, '21), playwright, filmmaker Ira Sachs ('01), actress and writer Sharon Washington ('24), Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang (’84, ’86, ’87, ’89, ‘90) and writer and choreographer Rachel Dickstein ('25).

All proceeds from the National Benefit support MacDowell’s mission to provide uninterrupted time, space, and community for artists to create bold and enduring works of the imagination.

Ticket and sponsorship packages for the Benefit can be made at the link below. For more information about the Benefit, or ways to support MacDowell, please contact our Benefit Office at (212)-465-3215 or via email.

Sade Lythcott is the Chief Executive Officer of the historic National Black Theatre (NBT), the nation’s first revenue-generating Black arts complex and one of the longest-running theaters led by a woman of color. A proud Harlem native, she is the daughter of the late Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, the visionary founder of NBT and a legendary champion of African-American arts and culture.

Sade is a staunch advocate for women and people of color in the cultural sector. She serves as chair of the Coalition of Theaters of Color and sits on the boards of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and the 125th Street Business Improvement District. She is a founding member of the Theatre and Live Performance Industry Council (TLPIC) and serves on the advisory boards of the Black Genius Foundation, Art in a Changing America, and the HueArts NYC Project.

Sade also co-leads Culture @ 3, an unprecedented cross-sector space convening over 1,000 of New York City’s nonprofit cultural leaders, funders, and elected officials to address urgent field-wide issues. In 2021, she was appointed to the Governor’s Task Force to reopen live performance venues across New York State, and later selected by the incoming New York City Mayor to co-lead the Parks, Arts & Culture transition committee, shaping the blueprint for the city’s post-pandemic cultural recovery.

An activist for socio-spatial justice, Sade is leading NBT’s ambitious $100 million capital redevelopment project, reimagining the cultural corridor of 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem. Slated to open in 2027, the multi-use arts complex will house NBT’s new home, affordable housing for artists, and commercial and civic space for Harlem’s small businesses and creative communities. The project will serve as a global destination for Black theater and anchor Harlem’s identity as the cultural capital of the Black world.

Sade regularly speaks and lectures on the intersection of arts, activism, and spatial justice at institutions including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and NYU. She has contributed to the Center for an Urban Future’s City of Aspiration and has spoken on the cultural sector’s role in spatial equity at the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Architecture.

Her leadership and advocacy have been recognized by Town & Country (“Agent of Change”), New York Times, New York Magazine, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire and Madame Architect, and Oprah Daily, which named her one of the “Black trailblazers moving our world forward.”

As a TONY® Award-winning and EMMY®-nominated producer, Sade is a multi-hyphenate creative who expresses her worldview through writing, production, and design. She wrote and produced the acclaimed musical A Time To Love (recipient of three AUDELCO nominations), which is now in development in partnership with the Apollo Theater.

Before her executive leadership at NBT, Sade performed on Off-Broadway stages, including roles alongside Chadwick Boseman in Urban Transitions: Loose Blossoms at New Federal Theatre (directed by Woodie King, Jr.), and as Dorothy Dandridge in Dorothy Dandridge: Before, After & Now (directed by Dr. Teer). Her work has earned her numerous accolades, including the Key to Harlem for Excellence in the Arts, an OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence in Production and Advocacy on Behalf of Black Artists, and the Segal Center’s Change Maker “Frankie” Award.

Earlier in her career, Sade worked as an associate producer for MTV’s flagship program Total Request Live (TRL), before transitioning into fashion journalism, styling, and design. Her clientele included artists such as Lenny Kravitz and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.

Sade holds a BA in Art History from New York University. In her spare time, she explores sacred space design rooted in indigenous practice and embraces the joys of motherhood with her son, Thelonious.

Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss-born, raised, and trained graphic designer based in New York.

She is the founder of CreativeMornings, a global community that brings together kind, heart-centered humans who believe in the power of creativity and generosity. What began as a small breakfast lecture series in New York has grown into a movement spanning 258 cities in 73 countries, gathering 25,000 creatives every month, for free.

CreativeMornings is Tina’s love letter to humanity, rooted in her belief that the world we make when we stand in a place of creativity and optimism is fundamentally different from the world we make out of fear.

At her core, Tina is a builder: of ideas, of networks, and of spaces where creativity and human connection can thrive.

Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, GA) documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate Black life in American art. In addition to being the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., she was also awarded the Pollock Prize for Creativity by Pollock-Krasner Foundation, as well as the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art. In 2018, Sherald was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her work is held in public collections such as the Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

If you read Ruth Ann Harnisch's Wikipedia page, you'll see she's an American investor, activist, philanthropist, writer, and coach. After a career in television journalism, radio talk shows, and newspaper columns, she began supporting the journalism, storytelling, and leadership of others.

Do you watch documentaries? Ruth Ann's name is in the credits of around 400 films, as an independent producer and in collaboration with other funders.

Projects she's supported earned her a couple of Emmy Awards, and she shares a Best Doc Oscar for Icarus with other Impact Partners funders. As a Broadway co-producer, Ruth Ann was Tony-nominated for *SUFFS*. (Ruth Ann voiced a portion of a Grammy-winning spoken-word record in the 1980s but all she can remember is she got paid $50.) She says it's an honor just to be EGOT-adjacent.

Ruth Ann is the Publisher of the Sunday Long Read, a title granted for her support of the week's best journalism, guest-curated and free to readers. She supports literally hundreds of independent voices in journalism and commentary through their Substacks, newsletters, online and IRL communities.

Her biggest investment in communities: CreativeMornings. Ruth Ann is the first Patron of the international friendship engine created by honoree Tina Roth Eisenberg.

Ruth Ann Harnisch is the founder and president of the Harnisch Foundation. Since 1998, the Foundation has supported thousands of grantees working toward a world where everyone gets what they need to thrive.

The Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award honors 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.

The Hillcrest Arts Impact Award recognizes institutional or corporate leaders whose contributions to the arts and culture sector have had a profound impact on the work, wellbeing, and amplification of artists. Named for Hillcrest, the historic home of Edward and Marian MacDowell, the award honors the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of MacDowell’s founders who worked tirelessly from the seed of an idea to build and sustain a vibrant organization supporting artists across the United States and around the world.

A two-time MacDowell Fellow, Nicholas Boggs ('11, '21) is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography, Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG, 2025), winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Stonewall/Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award, the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and the American Book Award. It was named a Top Ten Book of 2025 by Time magazine and The Atlantic, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. In addition, it was also recognized with an Audie Award for Best Audiobook in History/Biography.

Boggs also co-edited a new edition of Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018). His research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. He was educated at Yale (BA), American University (MFA), and Columbia (PhD). He lives in New York City.

David Lang (’84, ’86, ’87, ’89, ‘90) is one of the most honored and performed American composers writing today. His works have been performed around the world in most of the great concert halls.

Lang’s 'the little match girl passion', commissioned by Carnegie Hall, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. Lang’s 'simple song #3', part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s film YOUTH, received many awards nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe.

Lang’s opera 'prisoner of the state' (with libretto by Lang) was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam’s De Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, Bruges’s Concertgebouw, and Malmö Opera, and premiered June 2019 in New York, conducted by Jaap van Zweden. March 2026 saw the premiere of his evening-length oratorio for soloists, chorus and the New York Philharmonic, entitled 'the wealth of nations', which presents classic 18th century economic concepts in a format self-consciously patterned on the structure of Handel’s Messiah, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

Lang is a Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can.

Ira Sachs ('01) is a NYC-based filmmaker whose feature films include The Man I Love, Peter Hujar’s Day, Passages, Frankie, Little Men, Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On, and Forty Shades of Blue. A Rockefeller, Guggenheim, MacDowell, and Yaddo Fellow, Sachs’s work is held in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. He is also the Founding Director of Queer|Art, an arts organization built to support mentorship for LGBTQ+ artists and born out of the recognition of a generation of artists and audiences lost to the AIDS crisis.

Sharon Washington ('24) appeared as Joyce Thomas, the family matriarch in Power Book III: Raising Kanan for four seasons. Other television appearances include recurring roles on Bull, Blue Bloods, Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU among others. She was featured in the Academy Award nominated film Sing Sing with Colman Domingo and in Joker: Folie À Deux reprising her role as Debra Kane from the first Joker film. Other film work includes: On The Basis of Sex, The Kitchen, and Michael Clayton.

Sharon was nominated for a 2023 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical as co-writer of New York, New York. She made her debut as playwright at City Theatre with the world-premiere of her solo play Feeding The Dragon which subsequently played at Hartford Stage and made its Off-Broadway debut at Primary Stages where she was the Primary Stages 2017-18 Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence. Her performance was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Lucille Lortel Award and won an Audelco Award. Feeding the Dragon is available as a best-selling Audible Original audio play and was selected as an Audible Essentials Top 100 pick. She is currently working on a picture book adaptation of her story: The Little Girl Who Lived in the Library for Scholastic. Sharon is proud to have been selected as a 2024 MacDowell Fellow and was awarded a 2024 Princeton University Library Research Grant for her new play A Colored Mirror. Her creative journey is chronicled in the award-winning documentary film When My Sleeping Dragon Woke directed by Chuck Schultz and Judah Lev-Dickstein.

Sharon continues to perform on stage where she was recently seen as Marie Dindon in the NY City Center Encores! production of La Cage Aux Folles with Billy Porter and Wayne Brady. She appeared as Queen Margaret in the Public Theater/Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III starring Dania Gurira, which was broadcast on PBS Great Performances. Sharon holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and a BA from Dartmouth College. She currently serves on the boards of The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Girl Be Heard and Upstate Films