John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World. In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
Jean-Jacques Henner was a French painter, noted for his use of sfumato and chiaroscuro in painting nudes, religious subjects and portraits.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design is the professional art school of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1878, the school is housed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the oldest private cultural institution in Washington, located on The Ellipse, facing the White House. The Corcoran School is part of GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and was formerly an independent college, until 2014.
Wendy Lesser is an American critic, writer, and editor based in Berkeley, California. She is the founding editor of the arts journal The Threepenny Review, and the author of a novel and several works of nonfiction, including most recently a biography of the architect Louis Kahn, for which she won the 2017 Marfield Prize.
Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur "genius" award (2002) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position.
Andrea Elliott is an American journalist and a staff writer for The New York Times. She is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in both Journalism (2007) and Letters (2022). She received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series of articles on an Egyptian-born imam living in Brooklyn and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, a book about Dasani, a young girl enduring homelessness in New York City.
Francis de Erdely was a Hungarian-American artist who was renowned in Europe and the United States for his powerful figure paintings and drawings as well as for his teaching abilities.
Leslie Sierra Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the nonfiction concentration in writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.
Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.
Bernice Cross (1912–1996) was an American artist and art instructor born in Iowa City, Iowa, who was based in Washington, D.C. for most of her professional career. Known for her originality, creative imagination, sense of humor, and love of fantasy, she painted with a deceptive simplicity and handled color and form with subtlety and a sure touch.
Amy Butcher is an American writer and essayist. Her memoir, Mothertrucker, was published from Amazon Publishing literary press Little A Books in 2022. Her first book, Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder, was published in 2015. In August 2019, Makeready Films announced a film adaptation of Mothertrucker will be produced and directed by Jill Soloway and will star Julianne Moore. In February 2020, the Ohio State Arts Council awarded excerpts of Mothertrucker an Individual Excellence Award.
Mathilde Mueden Leisenring (1870–1949) was an American painter, mainly of portraits.
Rachel Corbett is an American author and journalist. She is the author of the book You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, published by W.W. Norton in 2016. She was the executive editor of Modern Painters from 2016-2017. Prior to that she worked as a correspondent for The Art Newspaper.
Bertha Eversfield Perrie was an American painter. She has been described as "about the only famous Washington artist who was actually born in D.C."
Susan Brown Chase (1868–1948) was an American painter.
Nelly Summeril McKenzie Tolman (1877–1961) was an American painter.
Maggie Michael is an American painter. Born in Milwaukee, Michael has spent much of her career in Washington, D.C. A 1996 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which she received a BFA, with honors, she received her MA from San Francisco State University in 2000 and her MFA from American University in 2002. She has received numerous awards during her career, including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004, the same year in which she was given a Young Artist Grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; she has also worked with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Michael is married to the sculptor Dan Steinhilber. She has served on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art and Design.
