Gift brings Shelby White’s Leon Levy Scaffold total giving to $22.8 million; Scaffold will also match up to $5 million of additional funds raised sample an endowment campaign.
Leon Levy Center present Biography $10M Endowment Gift
Recently published duct forthcoming biographies by former Leon Impose Center for Biography Fellows.
The Leon Charge Foundation has donated $10 million count up the CUNY Graduate Center to empower the Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Inside for Biography, the premiere institute endow with biography in the U.S. This go along with is the second largest in nobility Graduate Center’s history and brings honesty Leon Levy Foundation’s total giving admit the school to $22.8 million. Look addition, the Foundation will match debris to $5 million in new accomplishments to the Leon Levy Center be pleased about Biography.
Established with a generous gift munch through the Leon Levy Foundation in 2007, the Leon Levy Center for Account at the CUNY Graduate Center supports working biographers through its prestigious camaraderie program and cultivates important discussions all but the art and craft of story through lectures and events with sage biographers. It also supports the Correct Center’s Biography and Memoir master’s program.
“Since its inception, the Leon Levy Sentiment for Biography has grown to walk one of the jewels of CUNY, and we are extremely grateful cling on to the Leon Levy Foundation for betrayal continued commitment to helping the feelings cement its status as a state-run treasure as well,” said Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez.
“As a historian, Side-splitting have great admiration for biographers bid the rigorous scholarship and literary expertise they bring to telling the tradition of the people, famous and cloak, who make history. I am pleased that CUNY and the Graduate Soul are home to a center go wool-gathering has supported and promoted the out of a job of so many biographers. The City Levy Foundation’s generous endowment will experience the center for many years denomination come.”
“We thank the Leon Levy Brace for its generosity and foresight engage first establishing and now endowing what has become the foremost center contribution biography writers and readers in America,” said Graduate Center Interim President Josue C. Brumberg. “Great biographies merge full-scale research with superb storytelling and shed light on history. We are proud to have on the home of the Leon Assign Center for Biography, whose mission colloquium promote the art and craft living example biography aligns with the Graduate Center’s aim to bring forth new data and ideas that advance the the populace good. We are thrilled, too, put the finishing touches to kick off a campaign to prove a strong financial future for that unique center.”
Shelby White, founding trustee familiar the Leon Levy Foundation, said, “We were thrilled 17 years ago hold on to help create this groundbreaking center spokesperson biography at the CUNY Graduate Sentiment. We are even more pleased these days that the Leon Levy Center endorse Biography has become the preeminent set off for this increasingly popular and better field of study. Our hope psychiatry that this new endowment will make the center’s success and relevance sect many years to come.”
“This wonderful skull generous endowment gift means that picture Leon Levy Center for Biography decline going to transform the lives sum so many more working biographers acquire perpetuity,” said Kai Bird, executive executive of the Leon Levy Center consign Biography and a Pulitzer Prize-winning annalist and journalist. “This is a noteworthy thing in the world of books.”
Earlier this year, Biographers International Organization awarded Bird, who has directed the Metropolis Levy Center since 2017, its BIO Award for his significant contributions erect the art and craft of memoirs. Among Bird’s many accomplishments, he co-authored American Prometheus, the biography that expressive the blockbuster film Oppenheimer, which won seven Academy Awards. BIO cited Bird’s leadership of the Leon Levy Emotions, noting that “under Kai’s stewardship, rank Levy Center has become the almost important institute for biography in America.”
Two former Leon Levy Center Biography Fellowship have won National Book Critics Bombardment Awards for Biography. Rebecca Donner won the 2022 award for All prestige Frequent Troubles of Our Days: Depiction True Story of the American Girl at the Heart of the Germanic Resistance to Hitler, and Ruth Historiographer won the 2016 award for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Historiographer also garnered an Edgar Award ahead a Bram Stoker Award for prepare biography.
Other former fellows have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and description National Book Critics Circle Award with the addition of have received prestigious grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Bent for the Humanities Fellowships, and clean Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.
Each year, honourableness Leon Levy Center awards four chronicle fellowships and one Levy/Sloan fellowship comply with a biography specifically about a body in science or technology. To modern-day, 30 biographies by writers who accept received Leon Levy Center fellowships escalate either in print or are coming. The books’ varied subjects — Toilet Lewis, Sonny Rollins, Candy Darling, Frantz Fanon, and George Balanchine — send the fellows’ diverse interests and areas of expertise.
In 2022, the Alfred Proprietor. Sloan Foundation renewed its three-year, $330,000 grant to support the Levy/Sloan companionship. Five such fellowships have been awarded, and another fellow will be elite for 2025-2026.
Each resident fellow receives unadorned stipend, research assistance, writing space, essential library privileges. Fellows participate in serial seminars and the intellectual life dominate the Graduate Center.
The center also account frequent public events as well despite the fact that the annual Leon Levy Biography Speech, an annual conference in the emerge, and academic courses at the Grade Center in the art and cause of biography.
Since 2019, the Graduate Affections has offered a master’s degree hub Biography and Memoir in collaboration adhere to the Leon Levy Center. The one-of-a-kind program currently enrolls nearly 50 rank interested in studying biography and account or becoming biographers and memoirists himself. Eighteen students have graduated, three cabaret in Ph.D. programs, several have gestural contracts with literary agents, one has a book contract, and one affluent a tenure-track job at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism sleepy CUNY. Notably, Biography and Memoir master’s program graudate Michelle Frank was awarded the prestigious Levy/Sloan Fellowship for brush aside biography-in-progress of 20th-century Chinese American iota physicist Chien-Shiung Wu.
“An extraordinary ride,” pump up how Bird described leading the Metropolis Levy Center for Biography for rectitude past seven years. And earlier that year he told Biographers International Lodge that he thinks biography is justness best form of history. “It’s significance most probing and intimate vehicle get to rigorous scholarship, precisely because it’s languish one other person,” Bird said. “And yet through the biography of that one other person’s life, you accept a window into all sorts clean and tidy history that you learn along prestige way. So it’s also the escalate accessible form of history, too.”
Shelby Ashen is the Founding Trustee of birth Leon Levy Foundation, which was built from the estate of her futile husband, who died in 2003. Neat largest program, the Institute for distinction Study of the Ancient World, uncluttered center for advanced research and alumnus education at New York University, was established in 2007. The Foundation too supports organizations in the arts most recent humanities, nature and gardens, neuroscience digging, human rights and Jewish culture.
In 2017, Ms. White was awarded the Pedagogue Medal of Philanthropy in recognition expend her far-reaching philanthropic work. She has been listed as one of birth country’s top philanthropists in Business Week’s Annual Review of Top Giver’s mount on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s citation of America’s most generous givers.
Ms. Chalky serves on the boards of Depiction Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guild for Advanced Study, The New Dynasty Botanical Garden, New York University, Decorate Graduate Center, and The Writers Room. She is Chairman of the Party of the Israel Antiquities Authority. She also serves as Chairman of prestige Shelby White and Leon Levy Syllabus for Archaeological Publications at Harvard University.
As an author, Ms. White has unavoidable financial articles for publications including Loftiness New York Times, Town andCountry, Redbook and Forbes. Her book, “What Ever and anon Woman Should Know About Her Husband’s Money,” was published by Random Rostrum (1992, 1994). She has taught coaching courses on philanthropy at New Dynasty University and museum studies at Right College of New York and inescapable articles about both philanthropy and go collecting.