Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) is an artists’ community in Amherst, Virginia, USA. Since 1971, VCCA has offered residencies of two weeks to two months for international artists, writers, and composers at its working retreat in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. VCCA is among the nation's largest artist residency programs, and since 2004, has also offered workshops and retreats at its studio center in Southwest France, Le Moulin à Nef.

VCCA fellowships aim to intensify creativity by freeing more than 350 artists a year, up to 25 at a time, from the disruptions of everyday life. Fellows have a private room and studio, with three meals a day. Fellowships have been awarded to more than 4,000 writers, composers and visual artists nationwide and from 63 different countries. Honors accorded VCCA Fellows have included MacArthur genius grants, National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Rome, and the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations.

The Virginia writers Elizabeth Coles Langhorne and Nancy Hale Bowers founded VCCA in 1971. Hale Bowers, the first female reporter for The New York Times and a frequent "'New Yorker"' contributor, testified before the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Humanities that "if Virginia really wanted to further the arts, it could do so easily, moreover cheaply, by purchasing an abandoned motel and staffing it for writers to write in—feeding them and seeing that they were uninterrupted.”

The remark resonated with Langhorne, but her 1968 residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire suggested a considerably more elegant approach. She and Hale Bowers collaborated with Maria Miller and Edith Newcomb who donated the use of her Wavertree Farm, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Included on the original board were William Massey Smith, Alex von Thelen, Peter Taylor, and MacDowell Colony’s longtime Director, George Kendall.

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