Meet the Honorees

He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels In America, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. In 2012 he wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s movie Lincoln. His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Chicago Film Critics Award, and several others. He wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s award-winning 2021 movie remake of West Side Story. He co-wrote, along with Stephen Speilberg, the script for The Fabelmans a semi-autobiography based on Spielberg’s own childhood growing up in post-war Arizona. He also wrote the screenplay for the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, based on the book by David I. Kertzer. His books include But the Giraffe: A Curtain Raising and Brundibar: the Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. He is also the author of a collection of one-act plays titled Tiny Kushner, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, and an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, or The Old Lady Comes to Call. In addition, a revival of Angels in America ran off-Broadway at the Signature Theater and won the Lucille Lortel Award in 2011 for Outstanding Revival.

Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, two Oscar nominations, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, the 2012 National Medal of Arts, the 2015 Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater Award, the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the 2019 Dramatists
Guild Foundation’s Madge Evans & Sidney Kingsley Awards, and the 2020 Distinguished
Achievement Award, among many others. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling
with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock.

In “After Angels,” a profile of Tony Kushner published in The New Yorker, John Lahr wrote: “[Kushner] is fond of quoting Melville’s heroic prayer from Mardi and a Voyage Thither (“Better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals”), and takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history – among them, AIDS and the conservative counter-revolution (Angels In America), Afghanistan and the West (Homebody/Kabul), German Fascism and Reaganism (A Bright Room Called Day), the rise of capitalism (Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne), and racism and the civil rights movement in the South (Caroline, or Change). But his plays, which are invariably political, are rarely polemical. Instead, Kushner rejects ideology in favor of what he calls “a dialectically shaped truth,” which must be “outrageously funny” and “absolutely agonizing,” and must “move us forward.” He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances – a drag queen dying of AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans – and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized — a humanizing act of the imagination.” He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

An employee of Chicago area power utility ComEd since 2011, Dilla began making Tik-Tok videos in an effort to bond with one of his 7 children. Like every parent, Shermann “Dilla” Thomas is always on the lookout for ways to engage his children. So when his then 8-year-old daughter suggested a father/daughter collaboration to produce Tik-Tok dance videos, he was both elated and perplexed. Elated at the opportunity to use social media as a medium to bond with his daughter; perplexed by the persistent thought that he might do something more substantive with his efforts to produce content. Perhaps due to a yeoman effort to keep his dance moves off the Internet, Dilla came up with the novel idea of producing short videos focusing on the history of Chicago, a subject he has been independently studying for 20 years. The rest of the story is, as they say, history.

Dilla’s followers now have reached 83,000 on the platform, and he has tens of thousands on Twitter and Instagram. He is blue check verified on all 3 platforms. His name on social media, @6figga_dilla, comes from his love of the employment trades, as he believes that you can reach monetary success (or six figures) there just as quickly as if you become a doctor or a lawyer. Although Dilla’s focus is aimed squarely at underexposed aspects of Black Chicago, his work continually reveals the rich tapestry of Chicago’s overall history. Anchored in the background as the son of a policeman, Dilla’s philosophy is “Everything Dope about America comes from Chicago, the greatest city on earth.”