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NEW YORK, NY (June 11, 2001) — New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), New York’s largest grant provider to individual artists from every discipline, tonight announced its first time  winner of  NYFA’s $25,000 Prize to Monteith McCollum, a 2001 NYFA Fellow in Film, at tonight's Champions of the Arts Awards Benefit at Tribeca Rooftop. The Prize consists of a $25,000 unrestricted award in addition to the $7,000 NYFA Fellowship also awarded to Mr. McCollum. The benefit, celebrating NYFA’s 30th anniversary of support for artists, also honored playwright and former NYFA Fellow David Henry Hwang and architect Hugh Hardy, founding partner of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates.

With the support of a generous anonymous donor for four years, the New York Foundation for the Arts has established the NYFA Prize to be awarded annually to an artist of exceptional promise. A panel drawn from NYFA’s Artist Advisory Committee selected six finalists from the recipients of the 2001 NYFA Fellowships. A Board of Trustees committee made the final selection. In addition to rewarding artistic promise, the Prize seeks to dramatize the need for substantial unrestricted grants for artists and to encourage other donors to fund additional prizes and fellowships.

The NYFA Prize was presented by NYFA Board Chairman Margaret C. Ayers who said:  “NYFA is very pleased to award this first-time NYFA Prize for exceptional promise to a gifted filmmaker, Monteith McCollum.  For thirty years NYFA has nurtured artistic creation through its support of individual artists.  We hope that this new prize will not only help provide the time and freedom essential to enable Mr. McCollum and future artists to fulfill their talents but that it will also encourage other grant givers to follow our example.”

NYFA also announced the names of its other 157 fellows who received grants of $7,000 each and who this year represented the fields of Computer Arts, Crafts, Film, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, Performance Art/Multidisciplinary work, Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books, and Sculpture.

The NYFA Prize was awarded to Mr. McCollum for his film, Hybrid, on which he worked as cinematographer, animator, composer and producer. A film about love and alienation, Hybrid tells the story of Mr. McCollum’s 100-year-old grandfather, Milford Beeghly – a man obsessed with his agricultural experiments. The title, Hybrid, refers to the hybrid seed corn that was the object of these experiments. With a dry mid-western wit, the film observes his family’s difficulty in communicating with their eccentric father, who finds his most satisfying companionship in the whispers of rustling cornfields.

"Breaking the silence barrier that existed between Milford Beeghly and my family was the biggest challenge,” said Mr. McCollum. “Milford exists in his own world. Through six years of working on what was truly a labor of love, I have sampled all sorts of techniques, from cut out animation to pixelation, which I strove to combine within the film. In the process, I have used Hybrid to explore the potentials of different techniques within the medium as well as to learn to understand a difficult man whose contribution to agriculture as a whole has been monumental."

 Mr. McCollum's wife, Ariana Gerstein, who also won a 2001 NYFA Fellowship (in Computer Arts), edited the film. The two have worked together on projects in the past and hope to use the money from the NYFA prize to create a new collaborative work.
 Mr. McCollum earned his BFA in film and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994.  He has worked on several films as both Cinematographer and Composer. He currently resides in Barnton, NY.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) gives more money and support to artists of all disciplines than any other comparable organization in the country: nearly $8 million in grants and services annually.  Its Fellowships of $7,000 each --called "NYFAs" -- go to as many as 170 New York artists each year from a field of 16 disciplines, covering the visual, performing, and literary arts.  NYFA also gives special opportunity grants to artists and small arts organizations, and provides career development support via hotlines and print and electronic publications.

NYFA's annual budget of nearly $12 million comes from individual, corporate, foundation, and public sources, as well as NYFA's fiscal sponsorship/management services for artists and emerging organizations.

To learn more about NYFA and its programs and services: www.nyfa.org.