Ida Applebroog (1986 NYFA Fellow, Graphics & 1990, Painting) is one of America's leading painters. Some common themes of her work are gender and identity. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in galleries and museums all over the world. She was a 1993 MacArthur Fellow.
	Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio (1985, 1987, 1998, NYFA Fellows, Architecture; 2012 Hall of Fame Inductees) are the principals of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, one of the world's better known and imaginative architecture firms. Current, critically acclaimed projects include The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Manhattan's High Line and the Eyebeam Atelier of New Media & Technology. Noted completed projects include their Blur Building in Switzerland. They are the first architects to win a MacArthur Prize.
	David Hammons (1987 NYFA Fellow, Sculpture) was recently referred to by the New York Times as "one of the three or four most interesting and influential American artists of the last 30 years." Hammons' work is derived from the African American, urban experience. His art works spring from artifacts of African-American life to confront cultural and racial issues and stereotypes.
	John Jesurun (1988 NYFA Fellow, Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Work) is widely known as one of the innovators of avant-garde theater. His Chang In A Void Moon is the first serialized play ever produced in New York City.
	Ann Lauterbach (1988 NYFA Fellow, Poetry) is the author of five collections of poetry, including And For Example and Clamor. In 1993 she was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. She is a professor at the City College and Graduate Center; she is also head of the writing faculty in the MFA program at Bard College.
	Susan Marshall (1985 & 2002 NYFA Fellow, Choreography)was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and is the Artistic Director/Chroeographer of Susan Marshall & Company which since 1982 has performed more than thirty dance works she created with them including One and Only You, The Descent Beckons, The Most Dangerous Room in the House, Spectators at an Event, Fields of View, Contenders, Arms, Interior with Seven Figures, Kiss, Standing Duet, and Cloudless.
	Meredith Monk (1985, 1996 NYFA Fellow in Music Composition, Choreography) is American dancer, choreographer, composer, filmmaker, a 1995 MacArthur Fellow, and a major figure in the avant-garde. She has recorded several albums of her own songs, as well as music for films including The Big Lebowski. The 40-character multimedia theater piece Quarry (1976) is recognized as a masterpiece.
	Pepon Osorio (1988, 1995 NYFA Fellow, Sculpture) is one of America's leading sculptors and a 1999 MacArthur Fellow. Best known for large-scale installations, Osorio was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and El Museo del Barrio in New York, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, among others.
	Eiko Otake and Koma (1987 & 1996 NYFA Fellows, Choreography), known as the duo Eiko and Koma, have collaborated for more than two decades, choreographing and performing their own work. Among their recent efforts is River, an "outdoor environmental exploration." Premiered in Lexington, NY, in 1995, the work brought modern dance to an open-air setting and integrated choreographed movement with motifs from nature. They were 1996 MacArthur Fellows.
	Suzan-Lori Parks (1990 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting; 2012 Hall of Fame Inductee) won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Top Dog Underdog - a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African American life. Parks wrote her first screenplay for the 1996 Spike Lee movie Girl 6; and her most recent teleplay is Their Eyes Were Watching God, based upon the novel by Zora Neale Hurston. She is the author of the novel Getting Mother's Body. She was a 2001 MacArthur Fellow.
	Yvonne Rainer (1990, 1995 NYFA Fellow, Choreography) is a cutting-edge filmmaker best known for her film MURDER and murder. She is also a 1995 MacArthur Fellow.
	Elizabeth Streb (1986, 1990, 1994, & 2002 NYFA Fellow, Choreography) was a 1997 MacArthur winner. Her work has been seen on The David Letterman Show, in a special on CBS Sunday Morning, on CNN's Showbiz Today, Nickelodeon, NBC's Weekend Today, MTV, Larry King Live (debating with Dick Armey about the National Endowment for the Arts) and ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings.
	Julie Taymor (1985 NYFA Fellow, Performance Art) is a leading theater director, having brought The Lion King to Broadway, and an innovative filmmaker, with Frida (starring Selma Hayek) among her credits. Frida, about the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, earned six Academy Award nominations, including winner for Best Score. In 1998, Ms. Taymor became the first woman to ever win a Tony Award for best director (The Lion King).
	Fred Wilson (1987 and 1991 NYFA Fellow in Sculpture; 2013 Hall of Fame Inductee) lives and works in New York. Wilson creates new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections—including wall labels, sound, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects. In his groundbreaking intervention, "Mining the Museum" in 1992, Wilson transformed the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to highlight the history of slavery in America. Wilson received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2000. He is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition, and Knowledge at Skidmore College. He represented the United States at the 1992 Cairo Bienniale and 2003 Venice Biennale.

Academy Awards

	Zana Briski (1998 & 2004 NYFA Fellow, Photography)is the writer and director of Born into Brothels, which won the 2005 Oscar for Best Documentary. The film is about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta's red light district. The idea for the film came about while Ms. Briski was photographing the children of Calcutta, a project for which she had used her NYFA Fellowship no-strings attached funds. Briski has since started a non-profit organization to continue this kind of work in other countries, Kids with Cameras.
	Maryann De Leo (1989 NYFA Fellow, Video) directed Chernobyl Heart, which won the 2004 Oscar for Best Documentary Short. She has also received 2 National Emmy Awards, a Cable Ace Award, and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award. Her work has premiered at the American Museum of the Moving Image and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in addition to cinemas, on NBC, HBO, DCTV, and all over the world.
	Elliot Goldenthal (1989 NYFA Fellow, Music Composition; 2013 Hall of Fame Inductee) is an American composer of contemporary music and has written works for major motion pictures, concert hall, theater, and dance. His work includes music for films such as The Good Thief, Batman Forever, Heat, and the 2002 Academy Award winning score for Julie Taymor's Frida.
	Barbara Kopple (1985 NYFA Fellow, Film) is a film director who has won two Academy Awards, both for documentaries - first in 1976 for Harlan County, USA and the second in 1991 for American Dream the story of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota. She has directed episodes of the television drama series Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former. Kopple also directed A Conversation With Gregory Peck and Bearing Witness, as well as documentaries on Mike Tyson and Woody Allen. In the fall of 2006, she released a documentary, Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, about the Dixie Chicks' George W. Bush-related controversy.

Pulitzer Prizes

Jennifer Egan (1990 Fiction Fellow) is a writer who has earned national recognition for her novels The Invisible Circus (which became a feature film starting Cameron Diaz in 2001), Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and national bestseller The Keep. She has been awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewise B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her most recent novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (June 2010), received positive reviews from The New York Times, Time Magazine, and The Boston Globe, among many others. She received a 2011 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Visit to the Goon Squad.

	Oscar Hijuelos (1986 NYFA Fellow, Fiction) is the author of several novels including, A Simple Habana Melody, the Pulitzer Prize winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Empress of the Splendid Season, and Mr. Ives' Christmas. His five previous novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
	Aaron Jay Kernis (1988 NYFA Fellow, Music Composition) is one of the most highly-honored contemporary composers. Widely known works include the New Era Dance, which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, Colored Field for English horn and orchestra, and Symphony in Waves. Mr. Kernis is an active composer in high demand by such groups as the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.
	Tony Kushner (1987 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting) is one of America�s leading playwrights, having won a 1993 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which was later made into an HBO film, as well as an opera. Mr. Kushner also won a 1994 Tony Award for Angels in America: Perestroika. More recently, he co-wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 2005 Steven Spielberg film Munich.
	Zhou Long (2000 Fellow, Music Composition) is a Chinese-born American composer of mostly orchestral, chamber and vocal works that have been performed throughout the world. He received the Adventurous Programming Award from ASCAP (1999, for Music from China), a Grammy Award (1999, for the Teldec CD of his Words of the Sun and works by other composers) and the Academy Award in Music for lifetime achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003). He has also received numerous fellowships. Mr. Zhou served as composer-in-residence to the National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra of China from 1983-85 and as the Music Alive! composer-in-residence to the Silk Road Project Festival of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 2002. He received a 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work “Madame White Snake.”
	Donald Margulies (1988 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting) is an award-winning playwright who won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner With Friends � the story of a seemingly happy couple who re-examine their own relationship when their best friends decide to divorce. Other plays include Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, and Collected Stories.
	Lynn Nottage (1994 and 2000 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting/Screenwriting) is a 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for her play Ruined . Nottage's other plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; and Poof! She is also a MacArthur Genius Grant winner (2007), an OBIE Award winner, and has recieved the NY Drama Critics Circle Award, Best play and John Gassner Outer Critics Circle awards, American Theatre Critics/Steinberg 2004 New Play Award, 2004 Francesca Primus Award, and 2 AUDELCO awards.
	Suzan-Lori Parks (1990 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting; 2012 Hall of Fame Inductee) won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Top Dog Underdog - a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African American life. Parks wrote her first screenplay for the 1996 Spike Lee movie Girl 6; and her most recent teleplay is Their Eyes Were Watching God, based upon the novel by Zora Neale Hurston. She is the author of the novel Getting Mother's Body. She was a 2001 MacArthur Fellow.

Tony Awards

	David Henry Hwang (1985 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting) is the author of M. Butterfly (1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Awards, Pulitzer finalist), Golden Child(1998 Tony nomination, 1997 OBIE Award), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), The Dance and the Railroad (Drama Desk nomination), and Family Devotions (Drama Desk Nomination). His most recent play, Yellow Face won a 2008 OBIE Award and was also a 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2012, he won the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and was named the 2013 Residency One playwright at the Signature Theatre Company.
	Tony Kushner (1987 NYFA Fellow, Playwriting) is one of America's best-known playwrights, having won a 1993 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which was later made into an HBO film (2004 Emmy winner), as well as an opera. Mr. Kushner also won a 1994 Tony Award for Angels in America: Perestroika. More recently, Mr. Kushner co-wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 2005 Steven Spielberg film Munich.
	Julie Taymor (1985 NYFA Fellow, Performance Art) is a leading theater director, having brought The Lion King to Broadway (which she directed for some time) and an innovative filmmaker, with Frida (starring Selma Hayek) among her credits. Frida, about the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, earned six Academy Award nominations, including winner for Best Score. In 1998, Ms. Taymor became the first woman to ever win a Tony Award for best director (The Lion King).

More Names You Know

Doug Aitken (2000 Fellow, Video) is the creator of various visual arts works, including video installations and music videos. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), among others. His video installation sleepwalkers at MoMA in winter 2007 turned the facade of the building into an outdoor movie screen.

Joe Berlinger (1991 Fiscally Sponsored artist) is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist and photographer, whose films include the celebrated documentaries Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost, and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Brother's Keeper, Berlinger's NYFA Fiscally Sponsored artist project, won Best Documentary recognition from the Directors Guild of America, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle and the Sundance Audience Award, among others. Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009) is his latest film and has already garnered much critical acclaim.

Ross Bleckner (1985 Fellow, Painting) is a noted New York painter. His first solo exhibition was staged by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1988. With his 1995 mid-career retrospective, he was the youngest artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His work is featured in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

James Casebere (1985 and 1994 Photography Fellow, 1989 Sculpture Fellow) primarily works with constructed photography, creating and photographing architectural models. His works relate to such topics as the suburban home, the myth of the American West, and the development of cultural institutions during the Enlightenment. His work has been collected by museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

	Billy Collins (1986 Fellow, Poetry) was America's poet laureate from 2001-2003. He has written six books of poetry, and has recorded a CD of his works, called The Best Cigarette. Collins has also had poems included in The Best American Poetry 2002 and The Best American Poetry 2003. In 1992, he was chosen by the NY Public Library to serve as Literary Lion.

Abigail Child (1985, 1993, 1999, 2005 Film Fellow, 1991 Fiscally Sponsored Artist for Film, 1994, 1995 Fiscally Sponsored Artist for Video) Child is the recipient of many fellowships and grants such as the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (Russia), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Ford Media Grant, an National Endowment for the Arts Media and Interarts Grants. Her works, which involve montage and sound/ image relations, has been shown all over the world.

Thulani Davis (1992 Fiction Fellow, The Gregory Millard Fellowship Award) works across many disciplines, including (but not limited to) poetry, journalism, fiction, composing, and film. Her works include play Everybody�s Ruby, novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, poetry collection Playing the Saints, and contemporary opera X: The Life and Times of Malcom X. Among her numerous honors, she was inducted into the Black Writers Hall of Fame in 1998, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Work on X: The Life and Times... (1993), won a Grammy the same year for Best Album notes on Aretha Franklin's Atlantic Recordings(the first woman to win in the category), and received a Manhattan Borough President's Award for Excellence in the Arts & Literature (1987).

Tara Donovan (2003 Sculpture Fellow) has had solo museum shows at the likes of Metropolitan Museum of Art (2008), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2008), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004), and participated in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has also shown her work internationally in group shows. She was a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.

Carroll Dunham (1987 Fellow, Painting) is a highly influential American painter whose work bucks the trend of more traditional styles and incorporates an idiosyncratic combination of cartooning and biomorphism. The New Museum of Contemporary Art presented a major survey of his work in 2003. Mr. Dunham�s work is also a part of MoMA's permanent collection.

Karen Finley (1990, 1995, and 2001 Performance Art/ Multidisciplinary Work Fellow, 1986 Conceptual/ Performance Art Fellow) is a noted performance artist. Her shows frequently touch on feminist issues, sexuality, and censorship, and she is well known for her provocative performances. Her honors include and Obie Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on The American Chestnut.

J.E. Franklin (1990 Playwriting/Screenwriting Fellow) has received the Media Women Award (1971), the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1979); and the Rockefeller Grant (1980), to name just a few of her honors. Franklin is the founder of Blackgirl Ensemble Theatre in New York City. She is most famed for her play Black Girl (1971) and her depictions of African American life.

Erik Friedlander (1991 Music Composition Fellow) is a cellist who has worked with the likes of Laurie Anderson, Courtney Love's band Hole, and Dar Williams. Billboard wrote of Friedlander "[He is] one of today's most ingenious and forward-thinking musical practitioners."

Julia Glass (2000 NYFA Fellow, Fiction) was the recipient of the 2002 National Book Award in fiction for The Three Junes. She has also won several prizes for her short stories, including three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award. "Collies," the first part of Three Junes, won the 1999 Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella.

Todd Haynes (1989 Film Fellow, 1990 Fiscally Sponsored artist) is one of the best known directors of "independent film," who first gained recognition for 1991 Sundance winner Poison. Since then, he has written and directed several critically-acclaimed films including Far From Heaven and Velvet Goldmine. He is also the writer and director of I'm Not There, a film about Bob Dylan, in which several different actors play the role of the singer-songwriter.

Antony Hegarty (1997 NYFA Fellow, Performance Art) is the lead singer of the critically acclaimed band Antony & The Johnsons, whose hit album I Am A Bird Now has been called a classic by vaunted music publications in the U.S. and England. It won the UK's presitgious 2005 Mercury Prize for best album. Of Antony, the New York Daily News said: "Womanly in pitch and creamy in texture, Antony's vocals have the falsetto flutter of Bryan Ferry, the operatic flow of Klaus Nomi and the deep lung power of Nina Simone."

	A.M. Homes (1988 NYFA Fellow, Fiction) is a widely-read, critically acclaimed author of such short story compilations as Things You Should Know (a New York Times notable), The Safety of Objects, the novels The End of Alice and In a Country of Mothers, and the recently released This Book Will Save Your Life (2006). Her stories appear frequently in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among others.

Reginald Hudlin (1989 Fellow, Film) is a noted film director, with several popular films under his belt including: Boomerang, House Party, The Ladies Man, and Serving Sara, among others. He was also a director of the hit television program, The Bernie Mac Show. He one of the producers of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Hudlin, also an actor and producer, was the President of the Black Entertainment Television network from 2005 - 2008.

Tamara Jenkins (1995 Fellow, Film) is the writer and director of the critically-acclaimed 2007 film Savages, starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The screenplay was honored by the Independent Spirit Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics, the San Francisco Film Critics, and the National Society of Film Critics. She also wrote and directed the 1998 film Slums of Bevery Hills, starring Alan Arkin, Marisa Tomei and Natasha Lyonne.

	Nathaniel Kahn (2000 NYFA Fiscally Sponsored Artist) is the director of the noted documentary film My Architect, which explores the life, work and legacy of the renowned architect Louis I. Kahn. My Architect earned Nathaniel Kahn a Directors Guild Award in 2004 and was nominated for a 2003 Academy Award.
	Aaron Jay Kernis (1988 NYFA Fellow, Music Composition) is one of the most highly-honored contemporary composers. Widely known works include the New Era Dance, which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, Colored Field for English horn and orchestra, and Symphony in Waves. Mr. Kernis is an active composer in high demand by such groups as the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.

Barbara Kruger (1985 Fellow, Inter-Arts) is a photographer and socially conscious artist. She was an influential art director at Mademoiselle magazine. Recurring themes in her work are feminism and consumer culture. A UCLA professor, Ms. Kruger was honored at the 2005 Biennale with the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award.

Spike Lee (1985 NYFA Fellow, Film) is one of America�s best known and critically-acclaimed filmmakers. His oeuvre includes Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, and 25th Hour. Said Lee: "While their file says that I used the no-strings attached money from NYFA to finish editing She's Gotta Have It, it makes no mention of the recognition I felt at that crucial point in my career -- recognition that I was a filmmaker, that I had something important to say. I can't begin to describe how much that meant to me as a young artist."

Sherrie Levine (1987 Fellow, Painting) is a photographer and conceptual artist. Much of her work is in the form of very direct image appropriation. She first gained critical attention for her work in the 1980s, where she was considered part of an emerging group of political, conceptual artists which also included Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger.

Phillip Lopate (1991 Nonficiton Fellow) is an essayist, fiction writer and poet. His body of work includes the essay collections Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body; the novel Confessions of Summer and two poetry collections. Mr. Lopates�s writing appears in The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, and Film Comment, among other publications. A collection of his movie criticism Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published in 1998.

Audre Lorde (1985 Poetry Fellow) was a noted poet, writer and activist. Some of her better known poetry collections include The First Cities, Coal, and The Black Unicorn. Another published work, The Cancer Journals, documented her struggles with breast cancer.

Taylor Mac (2009 Interdisciplinary Fellow) is a playwright, actor, and singer-songwriter. His plays include The Lily's Revenge (Obie Award), The Young Ladies Of (Jeff Award and GLAAD Media Award Nominations), The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (Herald Angel Award) and Red Tide Blooming (Ethyl Eichelberger Award). TimeOut New York has called him, "One of the most exciting theater artists of our time." Taylor has performed his worked in The Sydney Opera House, The San Francisco MOMA and Opera House, New York's Public Theater, Stockholm's Sodra Teatern, The Spoleto Festival, The Bumbershoot Festival, The Time Based Arts Festival, Dublin's Project Arts Center, London's Soho Theater, and hundreds of others.

David Markson (2000 Fiction Fellow) was an experimental writer who often used the form of the novel as its subject. Among his works are Springer�s Progress (1977), Wittgenstein�s Mistress (1988) and This Is Not a Novel (2001). His early novel The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1965) was made into a movie entitled Dirty Dingus Magee starring Frank Sinatra.

Terry McMillan (1986 NYFA Fellow, Fiction), gained national attention in 1992 with her third novel Waiting To Exhale, which remained on The New York Times bestseller list for many months, and was made into a movie in 1995. Another of Ms. McMillan's popular novels How Stella Got Her Groove Back, was made into a movie in 1998. Her most recent work is The Interruption of Everything, which was published in 2005.

Marilyn Minter's (1988 & 1992 Painting Fellow) photo-realist paintings focus on the concept of "glamour" and how it is represented. A former student of Diane Arbus, Ms. Minter was a featured artist at the 2006 Whitney Biennial and her work has been exhibited all over the world, on public billboards, and in popular magazines.

Mira Nair (1988 NYFA Fellow, Film; 2013 Hall of Fame Inductee) is the writer, director, and producer of award-winning films such as Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, Monsoon Wedding and 2013’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In 1988, Nair's first feature film Salaam Bombay! won the coveted Camera d'Or for Best First Film at the Cannes Film Festival. Other awards included the Prix du Public at Cannes, Jury Prize and Most Popular Film at the Montreal World Film Festival and a nomination for Best Foreign Film from the Academy Awards.

Shirin Neshat (1996 NYFA Fellow, Photography) was born in 1957 in Kaswin, Iran. She is the co-founder of the Storefront for Art and Architecture (with husband Kyong Park) and began working as an artist after visiting Iran after the revolution of 1990. She has since received the highest acclaim for photographs, film, and her devised video installations. In December 2010 Shirin Neshat was named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson, for "the degree to which world events have more than met the artist in making her art chronically relevant to an increasingly global culture," for reflecting "the ideological war being waged between Islam and the secular world over matters of gender, religion, and democracy."

Pauline Oliveros (1989 Music Composition Fellow) is a composer and performer who introduced the concept of incorporating all environmental sounds into musical performance. She served as the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros has received a performance award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance (1994), a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition (1973), an ASCAP Standard Award (1982-1999), and several National Endowment for the Arts Composers Fellowships (1990, 1988, and 1984), among others.

	Kimberly Peirce (1998 NYFA Fiscally Sponsored Artist) is the co-writer and critically-acclaimed director of Boys Don't Cry, for which Hilary Swank won the 1999 Oscar for Best Actress. Peirce utilized NYFA's Fiscal Sponsorship to create a trailer for this film. Her second film, Stop-Loss was released in 2008. Her next feature, Carrie will be released in late 2013.

Jose Rivera (1988 NYFA Fellow, Screenwriting) wrote the screenplay for the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries -- the story of a young, coming of age Che Guavara. Rivera was nominated for a 2004 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is also the author of many plays, including Marisol, Cloud Tectonics, The Street of the Sun, Sonnets for an Old Century, Sueño, Giants Have Us in Their Books, References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot and Adoration of the Old Woman. He is one of the founders of Los Angeles-based theater company, The Wilton Project and has also written extensively for Television.

Maggie and Suzzy Roche (2002 Music Composition Artist Fellows, 2002 Fiscally Sponsored Artist, Multi-Disciplinary) together with their sister Terre form the trio The Roches, and their debut album was named album of the year by The New York Times. The New York Music Awards called them the Best Vocal Group, and they have performed and recorded with Philip Glass, Paul Simon and The Indigo Girls. Maggie & Suzzy released Zero Church in 2001, an unusual collection of prayers set to music.

Norman Rush (Fiction Fellow 1985) won both the National Book Award and the Irish Times-Aer Lingues International Fiction Prize in 1991 for his first novel, Mating. He has also been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his first collection of short stories entitled Whites. His 1985 NYFA fellowship allowed him to bring Whites to its halfway point.

Andres Serrano (1987 Photography Fellow; 2011 Hall of Fame Inductee) is a noted American photographer whose large portraits include celebrities and controversial figures such as corpses and KKK members, and closely framed still lifes with religious icons, firearms, human waste, menstrual blood, and other bodily fluids. His work has been exhibited all over the world, and in NY at P.S.1, Paula Cooper Gallery, the International Center of Photography, and elsewhere.

Mona Simpson (1986 Fiction Fellow) is author of novels Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, and A Regular Guy. Her first novel Anywhere But Here was turned into a movie (1999) starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. She was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and has won several prestigious awards, including the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim grant, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

Michael Sorkin (1985, 1992 Architecture/ Environmental Studies) is the President of Terreform, a non-profit engaged in urban research and advocacy, and President of The Institute for Urban Design. Currently, he works as Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. He has served as Professor and Director of the Institute for Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1993- 2000). On his latest NYFA grant he remarked, "The grant was invaluable in my pursuit of several speculative urban and architectural projects." His books include Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Giving Ground, Wiggle, Local Code, Some Assembly Required, The Next Jerusalem, After the World Trade Center, Starting from Zero, Against the Wall, and Indefensible Space.

George Tsontakis (1988 NYFA Fellow, Music Composition) is an American composer whose music has been performed and broadcast by major orchestras, chamber ensembles, and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Japan. He was honored with the American Academy's prestigious award for lifetime achievement in 1995; and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2005.

Betty Woodman's (1985 NYFA Fellow, Crafts) art lies at the intersection of ceramics, painting and sculpture. Said The New York Times' Grace Glueck of Ms. Woodman's 2006 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, The Art of Betty Woodman: "Fixating on the vase, a time-honored vessel that goes back maybe to the dawn of history, Betty Woodman has brought it to spectacular new life in contemporary art. Her work both challenges and invokes the traditional elements of vase and vesselhood so imaginatively that it lives in a class by itself."

	John Yau (1988, 2003 Poetry Fellow, 1998 Fiction Fellow) is a poet, essayist, writer, and art critic. Among his works are Edificio Sayonara(1992), In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993), and Berlin Diptychon (1995), Forbidden Entries (1996), The United States of Jasper Johns (1996), and Borrowed Love Poems (2002). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.