The West Virginia University College of Creative Arts has named 24 students as Canady Scholars. To be considered for the award, students must have a high grade-point average, faculty references and be fluent in two languages.

The Canady Scholarship is awarded thanks to the Valerie Canady Charitable Trust Foundation. The scholarships are named for Valerie Canady, a Morgantown native and WVU summa cum laude graduate, who was among the 270 people who died in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in Dec. 1988. Canady, who worked for H.J. Heinz Co. in their London office, was an accomplished linguist and artist in different media of expression, especially in piano.

This year’s Canady Scholarship recipients are:

Lucas Barkley

Emily Budik

Maria Carmona Campo

Artur Chages de Souza Carneiro

Tong Ding

Irene Guerra Rudas

Ramirez-Macias Jose Fernando

Riley Ann Klug

Qifan Li

Qianmo Liu

Adelaide McDonald

Hanna Noh

Tian Qiu

Christian James Rhen

Samuel Rolim de Souza Araujo

Lisha Sai

Kaylee Saldaña

Andres Santana

Weiyang Sun

Sophia Noelle Villano

Reilly Wilcox

Alton Xian Rong Wong

Wenjun Xia

Jingyi Xu 

The Canady family has provided generous support to the College of Creative Arts for many years. The Creative Arts Center was renamed in 2020 to the Loulie, Valerie and William Canady Creative Arts Center, in honor of leadership gift from Valerie Canady Charitable Foundation.

The Canady Fund for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts provides for arts programming, educational enrichment opportunities, building improvements and discretionary support to benefit students, faculty and staff within the College of Creative Arts. The ongoing Canady Chamber Series brings classical music acts from across the country to Morgantown and the Canadys also played an important philanthropic role in creating the Art Museum of WVU. They were honored for their contributions as WVU’s Most Loyal West Virginians in 2018.