Famous Fulbright Artists & Musicians
The Fulbright program is the world’s largest and most diverse international exchange program. Now approaching its 80th year, the idea was proposed by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright following World War II with the goal of promoting diplomatic relations and cultural exchange between nations. Senator Fulbright summarized the goal of his namesake program:
“The Fulbright Program's mission is to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.”
Fulbright has produced Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, politicians, ambassadors, CEOs, professors, and university presidents. Additionally, among Fulbright’s ranks are some of the U.S.’s most celebrated performers, composers, and artists. I was certainly surprised to see some of the following names among Fulbright’s alumni:
Gary Graffman: the concert pianist, who served as director of the Curtis School of Music and taught Yuja Wang and Lang Lang, received a Fulbright award for music study in Italy in 1949.
Aaron Copland: the distinguished American composer, winner of an Academy Award and Pulitzer Prize, hardly needs an introduction. What you might not know is that he was a two-time Fulbright scholar in 1950 and 1964 to Italy, the U.K., Japan, Austria, and Germany.
John Steinbeck: the celebrated author of East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath and the winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature, Steinbeck was also a Fulbrighter in the Soviet Union in the 1960s.
Philip Glass: the acclaimed minimalist composer studied with none other than Nadia Boulanger in France as a Fulbright grantee in the 1960s.
Dale Chihuly: the glass artist whose breathtaking Seattle museum attracts crowds of daily visitors, held a Fulbright fellowship in Venice in 1968. In fact, he was the first Fulbrighter to be awarded a grant for the study of glass.
Renée Fleming: the Grammy-award winning soprano was a Fulbright fellow in Germany in the 1980s. Watch Fleming reflect on her Fulbright experience in a 2021 speech here: Fulbright 75th Anniversary Celebration
Maya Angelou: the late American poet, known for her beloved memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Liberia in 1986.
Julia Wolfe: the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and MacArthur Fellow laureate was a Fulbright U.S. Student to the Netherlands in 1991.
Sources:
https://www.fulbrightprogram.org/featured-fulbright-alumni-in-the-arts/
https://fulbrightscholars.org/article/14-notable-fulbrighters-fine-arts
This blog (www.melissaterrallpiano.com/blog) is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.