Dr. Diana Cejas has been named as one of the 2024 MacDowell Fall-Winter Fellows for artists working across disciplines. She has been awarded a fellowship in Literature for her writing focused on “patient advocacy and improving communication between healthcare providers and the disability community, particularly young disabled patients of color.”
Dr. Cejas is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a faculty member of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities. She provides clinical care to children, adolescents, and young adults with a wide range of neurodevelopmental disabilities and psychiatric comorbidities. Her writings are inspired by her own experiences with critical illness and how it has affected her life and career. Her essays have been featured in magazines including The Journal of the American Medical Association, Neurology, The Iowa Review, Ecotone, and Pleiades, among others, and have been anthologized in collections such as Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century and A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South.
Learn more about Dr. Cejas and her passion for writing here.
MacDowell is the nation’s first artist residency program, supporting the creative experience since the early 1900s. Notable artist fellows include James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Leonard Bernstein to name a few. MacDowell’s mission is to “nurture the arts by offering talented individuals an inspiring residential environment in which to produce enduring works of the creative imagination”. Find out more about MacDowell and the MacDowell fellowship on their website.