Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

History and Background

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was founded as the result of the merger of the Avalon Foundation, which was created in 1940 by Andrew Mellon’s daughter Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and the Old Dominion Foundation which was established in 1941 by Mellon’s son Paul.  When the two foundations were consolidated, the Avalon Foundation absorbed the Old Dominion Foundation and was renamed the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to honor the late father of the two philanthropists. At the time of the merger in 1969, the assets of the Foundation totaled $273 million and had appropriated just under $11 million combined in grants in 1968. ³

Activities

The Andrew W Mellon Foundation has four main programming areas in which it focuses the majority of its grantmaking. Most of the foundation’s grant recipients are colleges and universities, museums, libraries, and other significant cultural and academic institutions. The four program areas outlined by the foundation include higher education and scholarship in the humanities, arts and cultural heritage, scholarly communications and arts, and international higher education. Many of the programs funded by the Mellon Foundation are aligned with social liberalism. ⁴

In the higher education and scholarship in the humanities category, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation focuses on grants to a wide array of academic institutions, research, and student fellowships. This funding priority for the foundation includes funding for “research universities, liberal arts colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic-Serving Institutions.” Specific programs in the higher education space include two faculty fellowships, the Mellon Mays undergraduate Fellowship and the New Directions fellowship, as well as the Sawyer Seminars, all of which fund faculty research or lectures, with special focus on minority faculty members at colleges and universities. ⁵

Another program area that the Mellon Foundation specializes in is arts and cultural heritage, the foundation funds museums and arts programs across the world. The work of the foundation includes support of the visual and performing arts. The foundation touts environmentalism and the social impact of museums and art programs. The foundation also operates a fellowship program for aspiring museum curators. ⁵

The Mellon Foundation also has a programming area centered around “scholarly communications which focuses on funding for research and databases in academic settings. The foundation funds research libraries, academic libraries, museums, and archives and focuses on giving such organizations the ability to digitize collections. The Foundation states its grants will allow for the preservation of a wide array of media formats and lead to greater access for the public. ⁴

Among the research projects incubated by the Mellon foundation is JSTOR, a digital archive of millions of academic works. ⁶

The Just Futures Initiative is an educational grantmaking initiative of the Mellon Foundation to provide $ 5 million in grants over a 2-3 year period for “proposals from multi-disciplinary teams that include scholars from the humanities, arts, and humanities-inflected social sciences” ⁷ One of its projects, the  Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine by providing grants to fund healthcare technology-based proposals focused on “science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM)” as well as acknowledging “pervasive impact of systemic racism…to build more accurate narratives about histories of racism in the sciences and medicine…for building a more equitable university and society. ⁸

Leadership

Family Members

The foundation was formed as a result of a merger between foundations of the children of industrialist Andrew W. Mellon, who later served as Secretary of the Treasury for eleven years under Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, and briefly as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. ⁹

Mellon’s only two children, Alisa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon, used their father’s fortune to become among the nation’s most visible and well-known socialites and philanthropists. The Mellon siblings were prominently featured in Fortune magazine’s first list of wealthiest Americans with a net worth in between $400 million and $700 million in 1957 dollars each. ¹⁰

Like their father, both Mellons were tied to political figures. Alisa Mellon Bruce’s first husband served as ambassador to Argentina, and she remained active in philanthropy through the Avalon Foundation until her death in 1969. ¹¹ Paul Mellon became well known as an owner and breeder of racehorses, marrying fellow heiress Bunny Mellon and establishing a large family compound in Upperville, Virginia. His daughter Catherine Conover was the first wife of U.S. Senator John Warner (R-VA). ¹²

Leadership

Elizabeth Alexander is the president of the Mellon Foundation as of 2025. ¹³ As of December 2025, Alexander was appointed as a member of the arts & culture committee for New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. ¹⁴

Board of Directors

As of 2020, no members of the Mellon Family appear to serve on the board of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The board mostly consists of academics including Heather Gerken, the dean of Harvard Law School; Richard Broadhead, former president of Duke University; and several other current or former academics or museum curators. ¹⁵

As of 2020, chair of the board of the Mellon Foundation is Kathryn A. Hall, a prominent investment banker who runs Hall Capital Partners, which she founded. Hall is also a former board chair of Princeton University and sits on the board of the environmentalist groups NextGen Climate Action and NextGen Climate America. ¹⁶

In July of 2025, the Mellon Foundation appointed Carla Hayden as senior fellow. Hayden previously served as the 14th librarian of congress, as well as the president of the American Library Association. ¹⁷

Funding

Between 2010 and 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded nearly 5,000 grants totaling $2.65 billion according to its online grant database. ¹⁸

In March 2023, the Mellon Foundation awarded a $675,000 grant to the National Chavez Center for the purpose of supporting “the implementation of a comprehensive plan for collecting, preserving, archiving, and making accessible primary source materials documenting the life and work of Cesar Chavez.” ¹⁹ In 2026, sexual assault allegations emerged against Caeser Chavez, who passed away in 1993, while responses from the United Farm Workers of America and the Caesar Chavez Foundation attempted to distance themselves from Chavez along with cancelling commemorative events related to him. ²⁰

According to a January 2026 study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), out of Higher Education’s annual $772 billion “revenue base,” reportedly only 0.16 percent (or $1.2 billion per year) goes towards the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) from U.S.-based private foundations. In addition, the same study showed that in 2023, nearly 80 percent of private grantmaking towards HASS-based fields that year came from only 25 foundations. The top ten listed are: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (over $160.7 million), the Foundation to Promote Open Society (over $84.9 million), the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (over $66.2 million),  the John Templeton Foundation (over $66.5 million), the Duke Endowment (over $62.5 million), the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (over $51 million), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (over $49.7 million), the Windgate Charitable Foundation (over $48.5 million), the JPB Foundation (name changed to Freedom Together Foundation as of 2024) (over $36.6 million), and the Zell Family Foundation (over $35.2 million). ²¹

The Monuments Project

In 2020, the Foundation began the “Monuments Project,” a $500 million-commitment initiative meant to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces…[and] recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.” ²² Between 2020 and 2024, roughly 112 grants were made through the Project for a total of over $215 million: roughly 85 percent went to U.S-based nonprofits and universities while another 13 percent went towards national and tribal government entities. According to its website database, within this period of time the state of Virgina and the District of Columbia included the highest grant recipients (over $30 million and over $27 million respectfully), while the former included an over $5.7 million grant to the Montpelier Foundation to create “a memorial to the individuals who were enslaved at Montpelier.” ²²

One notable grant recipient of the Monuments Project is Monument Lab, a nonprofit charity that received over $12 million in grants between 2020 and 2024 (roughly $5 million between 2022 and 2023, and over $8 million between 2023 and 2024). According to additional reporting, several grants went towards the Monument Lab’s “National Monument Audit,” which claims “the story of the United States as told by our current monument landscape misrepresents our history,” and is “overwhelmingly white and male.” ²²

“Social Justice” Grants

A February 2026 thread posted on X (formerly Twitter) alleged that the Foundation, in 2018, had announced a grantmaking strategy focused on “social justice.” One example used on the post included a $500,000 grant in 2022 to the University of Illinois at Chicago for supporting “the integration of humanities-based critical race analysis into undergraduate curricula, faculty scholarship, and collaborative university-community projects.” Other examples used included a 2023 grant to the University of California Lost Angeles for $1 million to “support a global comparative study of race and disciplinary radicalization” and a $5 million grant to the University of Virginia towards supporting “…a project related to the university’s and region’s Indigenous and Black histories and a series of postdoctoral-to-faculty fellowships in related fields.” ²³

A February 2026 op-ed by the Wall Street Journal mentioned additional academia-related grants to U.S Universities with a focus on social justice. This includes a $500,000 grant to the University of Utah towards supporting a “Transformative Intersectional Collective” that focused on “transgender and queer of color critique…[and] environmental anti-racism” as well as an $8 million grant to the University of California Santa Cruz to support its “Visualizing Abolition” project that advocates for the “elimination of prisons.” ²⁴