Dogwood Village would like to recognize Anna Marie DeMio Dowen for her contributions to the facility. Anna Marie grew up in the Midwest where art and all its possibilities caught her attention very early on in life. She felt like an artist from the first moment she put line to paper.
This led her to pursue an art degree through studies at Western Illinois and Arizona State Universities, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was her husband’s internship in psychology at the University of Virginia that brought her to Charlottesville. The beauty of this entire area, with the Blue Ridge, and its Parkway, it’s hiking trails, its old growth trees—it captured their hearts and they settled in Madison County, where they raised a daughter, and continue to live.
Anna Marie has been directing and teaching for the Community Outreach Program through the Arts Center in Orange for over 18 years, a program that is entirely grant and private donation funded. She shares that it has been a most rewarding, treasured and enriching endeavor, allowing her to meet and work with people of all ages, from all walks of life, while sharing all of the vast wonders of the creative arts. In 2001 Anna Marie began to teach Art Adventures twice monthly for assisted living residents. Since then, a well-rounded creative arts program, with Outreach bringing speakers, authors, artisans and musicians has evolved for both facilities with the hopes of reaching and engaging each of the residents in varied and creatively-based ways. Anna Marie is pictured with Dogwood Village resident Jeanne Davis.