Leon Levy Archives Center Arts & Humanities

The Foundation supports several programmatic initiatives at cultural institutions that are designed to expand knowledge and encourage artistic efforts at the highest levels. It also provides unrestricted support to important organizations in the visual, performing and literary arts and humanities, mainly those located in New York City.

Mahler score, Courtesy NYPhilharmonic

Leon Levy Archives and Catalogues Program

The Foundation’s archives and catalogues program helps arts and humanities institutions process, preserve and use the important contents of their archives and store rooms, with the ultimate goal of making them more available to historians, writers, film-makers, and other scholars.

"An Eloquent Beginning" Program, 2008, Courtesy LLCB

Leon Levy Center for Biography, Graduate Center-City University of New York

With a $3.7 million gift, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York is creating a hub for writers, scholars, students and readers that is designed to bring fresh, innovative voices to the practice of biography and to strengthen its position within the academy. Guided by noted biographer Brenda Wineapple, the Center each year is home to four biography fellows, two dissertation fellows, and two graduate student fellows. The Center also hosts an annual lecture by a celebrated biographer, a series of talks by working biographers and an annual conference for both scholars and the public.

Studio at MacDowell Colony, © Victoria Sambunaris

Support Grants to Outstanding Artists, Scholars and Students

The Foundation provides support to three institutions that nurture work by outstanding individuals.

The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation uses its grant to supplement funding to Fellows with no academic or institutional affiliation, helping to cover the costs of their research, artistic endeavors, and living expenses.
The MacDowell Colony offers grants to individuals who would not otherwise be able to afford the time away that a residency requires. The money may be used to cover rent, childcare, and other expenses that accrue during a residency, to pay equipment costs and to replace lost income.
NYU Institute of Fine Arts provides travel grants to students seeking an advanced degree in art history, archaeology or conservation. The grants, available at the end of their first year, allow them to travel during the summer months to see works of art and architecture of scholarly interest anywhere in the world.

Syracuse University – Daniel Patrick Moynihan Chair in Public Policy

In honor of the late Senator, a longtime friend of Leon Levy, the Foundation endowed a chair in domestic policy at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where Sen. Moynihan both started his career, as a junior faculty member in 1959-61, and ended it, as a University Professor until his death in March 2003. Nationally recognized tax policy and public finance expert Leonard E. Burman was named to the post in August, 2009.

Leonard E. Burman

Works & Process

In honor of Mary Sharp Cronson, the founder of Works & Process, the Foundation provided a $1 million naming gift for the producer, ensuring that the program – which blends performance, demonstration, and discussion – will continue to explore the creative process behind a dance, an opera, an intellectual advance and similar endeavors.

Courtesy BLP

The Brooklyn Public Library

A Foundation grant allowed the Library to plan for an Information Commons at the Central Library, a communal, interactive destination space for students, scholars and all library users that will stress shared technology-based information.