Bienen School alumna Adrienne Taylor '06 MMus, a cellist and composer, has won a $25,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation’s Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship Fund. The fellowships are intended to enable artists to concentrate time on the creative process, focus on personal or professional development, expand their body of work, and explore new directions.

Taylor and two other awardees were selected from a pool of 74 applicants based on the quality of their work samples and the potential of the fellowship to advance their careers as emerging-to-mid-career artists.

“The single greatest barrier I face in writing music is the lack of an extended period of time in which to write and think about music,” said Taylor. “This fellowship will allow me to take time away from some of the playing and teaching I do in order to focus on creating new work.”

Taylor said the fellowship will enable her to pursue two major personal goals in music composition: to expand her compositional output to include chamber music and to create a set of place-inspired compositions that honor the beauty and deep history of natural spaces and draw attention to the impact climate change will have on those places.

A member of the Providence College cello faculty since 2019, Taylor has also been a resident musician at Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island, since 2012. She studied cello performance with Hans Jensen at the Bienen School of Music, where she received a Master of Music degree. She also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Established in 2003, the MacColl Johnson fellowships rotate among composers, writers and visual artists on a three-year cycle. Applicants have to be legal residents of Rhode Island. Students enrolled in a degree-granting program and artists who have advanced levels of career achievement are not eligible.


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