Following a nationwide search that began in March, VCCA is pleased to announce the appointment of Gregory Allgire Smith as our new Executive Director. Mr. Smith bested a field of more than 100 highly qualified competitors and has thirty years’ experience in the nonprofit arts sector, twenty of them as chief executive. His focus is to raise arts organizations to a higher level of programmatic service, public recognition and financial stability, while continually broadening their network of advocates. As board President Tina Walls said, “It was a rigorous search by a very dedicated committee, but Greg’s passion for the arts and his wide-ranging experience in arts education, management and fundraising made him an outstanding choice for taking VCCA to the next level of its growth.” As most of you know, our current executive director, Suny Monk, is retiring on October 17 after fourteen years of excellent service and dedication. “Suny’s built such a solid and inspiring foundation

Earthquake epicenter courtesy Scientific American VCCA had a whole lot of shaking going on but aside from losing our phone lines for a while, all is well. Earthquakes are not standard Virginia fare. Yet at 5.8, the one that hit us yesterday was not the largest. The record holder was in 1897 at 5.9. The epicenter in Mineral, Virginia is about 90 miles away. You'd think that since this quake was felt all the way up to Toronto, Canada, it would have been way stronger here. For a Virginian in August, the reason is ironic: our lithosphere is colder. The lithosphere is the outer rocky shell of Earth and because this crust is cooler on the East Coast, "...when something shakes, it is like hitting a bar of steel, it rings pretty well," according to Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. The West Coast lithosphere has a higher temperature, plus it is divided by active faults - which breaks up the transmission of vibrations. Still, eve

The New York Chamber Music Festival presents, in a co-production with Symphony Space, a commemorative tribute to the 10th Anniversary of September 11. Hosted by BD Wong, this free concert will be performed by musicians from the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, and is dedicated to the people of New York City. The concert will include the world premiere of Drew Hemenger's piano 4-hand version of Union Square, September 11, 2001 , performed by the internationally acclaimed piano duo Pascal Rogé and Ami Rogé. The September 11 Tenth Anniversary Commemorative Concert takes place at 7:00 pm Sunday, September 11 at Symphony Space. For more information, CLICK HERE

The Toronto International Film Festival has invited Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder and composer Olivia Block to screen their new work Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber of Disclosure as part of their Wavelengths program, a curated presentation of the best in international avant-garde film and video . TIFF Festival dates are Sept. 8-18, 2011. For more information - CLICK HERE

Inara Verzemnieks has won the eleventh annual Goldfarb Family Fellowship. An award-winning journalist before leaving to start her writing career, Inara is currently an Arts Fellow in The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in the (Portland) Oregonian, The Washington Post and The Atlantic , as well as the online literary magazine Defunct . In 2007, Verzemnieks was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. Her fully funded two-week residency at VCCA begins in late December. The Goldfarb Family Fellowship is one of the most highly competitive awards offered by VCCA. This years competition was judged by VCCA Fellow Helen Benedict , a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of eleven books: six novels and five nonfiction. The Goldfarb Fellowship is endowed by VCCA Fellow and former VCCA Board member, Ronald Goldfarb , a respected author, agent and attorney. He has written eleven books and over three

E.J. Levy of Washington, D.C. - who won VCCA's 2009 Goldfarb Fellowship - has been named a winner of the Flannery O'Conner Short Fiction Award for her collection, My Life in Theory . The collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall. E.J. Levy has published stories in journals including Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review and North American Review . She is also published widely as an essayist in publications including The New York Times, The Nation and Orion . She is the editor of the anthology Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New America Writers , which won a Lambda Literary Award. The judge who selected Levy's manuscript, My Life in Theory , as a finalist noted, "Before I read this collection, I would have scoffed at the idea that I could be captivated by stories that address different theoretical constructs. But the theories investigated here quickly yield to an idiosyncratic cadre of characte