Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY Wins Peabody’s Institutional Award
Presented by Oprah, ARRAY Honored for Amplifying Film & TV by People of Color and Women Filmmakers
The 81st Annual Peabody Award Winners will be Announced Virtually June 21st through June 24th
ATHENS, GA (June 8, 2021) – Peabody today announced that ARRAY, the multi-platform arts and social impact collective dedicated to narrative change founded by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, has won an Institutional Award. Oprah presented Ava DuVernay with the honor this morning via video. ARRAY is being recognized for its role in amplifying film and TV projects by people of color and women filmmakers. Selected by the Peabody Board of Jurors, the Institutional Award recognizes institutions and organizations, as well as series and programs, for their enduring body of work and their iconic impact on both the media landscape and the public imagination.
“As an Academy Award nominee and multiple Peabody and Emmy Award winner, Ava has leveraged her remarkable success to amplify and uplift women directors and storytellers of color,” said Jeffrey Jones, executive director of Peabody. “ARRAY has produced an incredible slate of projects centered around Black experiences and has led many inspirational initiatives to support up-and-coming filmmakers of color. It’s an honor to name ARRAY winner of this year’s Institutional Award.”
Founded in 2011 by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, ARRAY is as much a center for disruptive institutional and narrative change as it is a production house. Indeed, its creative campus in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles is itself a rejection of antiquated Hollywood thinking, not just in foregrounding absent voices and missing representations in front of and behind the camera by people of color and women, but in reimagining how projects are greenlit, created, produced, and distributed, and by whom. In ten short years, ARRAY has built the institutional infrastructure to produce award-winning content in film (Caste) and television (Queen Sugar), across genres of drama (When They See Us), documentary (13th), unscripted (Home Sweet Home), and animation (Wings of Fire).
ARRAY is deeply invested in the social impact of its work and has created educational and learning materials for much of its content, as well as programs such as LEAP (Law Enforcement Accountability Project) to commission art projects in the service of social justice activism. Understanding the enormous opportunity to address diverse hiring practices within the industry, the non-profit ARRAY Alliance recently launched ARRAY Crew, a database for below-the-line production personnel. It’s easy to see that DuVernay and her women-led team at ARRAY have not waited for permission to build, create, grow, and envision a more equitable future for neglected filmmakers, artists, and social activists. Through brilliant vision and old-fashioned sweat equity, ARRAY has crafted a new way forward in an industry heavily resistant to change.
Recent winners of the Institutional Award include The Simpsons, 60 Minutes, Sesame Street, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Kartemquin Films, FRONTLINE, and ITVS.
The 30 winners of the 81st annual Peabody Awards will be named during a multi-day virtual celebration from June 21st through June 24th. Celebrity presenters will announce each winner via a short video which will include remarks from the winners. Videos will be pushed out on June 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th between 9:00am PT and 10:30am PT each day. The winners will be announced on the following platforms:
Twitter: @PeabodyAwards
Instagram: @PeabodyAwards
Facebook: Peabody Awards
Website: http://peabodyawards.com/
Hashtags: #PeabodyAwards #StoriesThatMatter
About Peabody Awards
Respected for its integrity and revered for its standards of excellence, the Peabody is an honor like no other for television, podcast/radio, and digital media. Chosen each year by a diverse Board of Jurors through unanimous vote, Peabody Awards are given in the categories of entertainment, documentary, news, podcast/radio, arts, children’s and youth, public service, and multimedia programming. The annual Peabody winners are a collection of 30 stories that powerfully reflect the pressing social issues and the vibrant emerging voices of our day. From major productions to local journalism, the Peabody Awards shine a light on the Stories That Matter and are a testament to the power of art and reportage in the push for truth, social justice, and equity. The Peabody Awards were founded in 1940 at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia and are still based in Athens today. For more information, visit peabodyawards.com to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on social:
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