40TH ANNUAL ACADEMY OF THE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS DINNER

Katie Couric (@katiecouric) is an award-winning journalist and #1 New York Times best-selling author of her memoir, Going There, which was published in October 2021. She is also a co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), which has raised almost $800 million for cancer research. Couric was the first woman to solo-anchor a network evening newscast, serving as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News from 2006 to 2011, following 15-years as co-anchor of NBC’s Today show. 

Carl Bernstein is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist renowned for his investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal alongside Bob Woodward at The Washington Post, coverage that contributed to President Richard Nixon’s resignation and set new standards for investigative journalism. The pair later wrote the best-selling books All the President’s Men and The Final Days. Bernstein has authored several other notable works, including memoirs and political biographies. His articles have appeared in major publications like Time, USA Today, and Rolling Stone. Bernstein served as editor and executive vice president of Voter.com. He has also worked as Washington bureau chief and correspondent for ABC News; and, while at the Washington Post, was also a part-time rock critic.

Leila Maw Straus has lived in New York since leaving London in 1981.  She is a graduate of Leeds University and LSE and has loved the theatre and the arts since she first worked in London in the seventies.

Whilst living in London, Straus worked for the Boston Consulting Group, ran her own Market Development Service, and worked in group corporate planning and evaluation of diversification opportunities for the Granada Group PLC.  She then became Managing Director for Granada Television International in New York.  She has served on several not-for-profit boards and is currently Chair of the National Theatre America Board.  

Straus was recognised by the Queen in the 2014 New Year Honours list, awarded an MBE for her services to philanthropy and the arts. The Straus Family Foundation broadly aims to serve the common good and encourage equal opportunity. Her late husband Mickey was Chair of Guild Hall for many years.

Victor Garber has six Emmy, four Tony Award nominations, and has been inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. Garber co-starred in the Academy Award®-winning film, “Titanic”, and co-starred in Ben Affleck’s Academy Award®-winning film, ARGO. He is also portrayed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award®–nominated film “Milk.” Additional film credits include “Happiest Season,” "Dark Waters", "Sicario" & "Self-Less". His work on television includes “Alias,” “The Last Thing He Told Me,” “And Just Like That,” “The Orville,” “Power Book II: Ghost,” & “Schitt’s Creek”. Will next be seen in Hulu’s new series “Not Suitable For Work.” 

Photo: Andrew Egan

Sarah Sze (b. 1969) is widely recognized for creating a singular visual language that moves fluidly across—and ultimately dissolves—the traditional boundaries between sculpture, painting, drawing and installation. Rather than treating these forms as separate disciplines, she allows images to enter space, objects to function as marks, and structures to operate simultaneously as composition and architecture. This continuous movement across mediums produces environments in which perception is not fixed but actively formed, and meaning emerges through attention, duration and encounter.

Working with materials and sources drawn from both physical and digital worlds, Sze creates environments that mirror the velocity and density of contemporary experience. Her works move between intimate detail and expansive spatial fields, asking viewers to navigate accumulation, interruption and overload. Rather than offering clarity or resolution, Sze’s layered assemblies slow perception down, making visible how meaning forms, fractures and re-forms under conditions of constant visual flow.

In a culture shaped by speed, saturation and continuous distraction, her work insists on attention—revealing how perception, memory and presence are actively constructed in the moment. Sze has created public works including Shorter Than the Day (2020), a suspended sculpture for LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B, and Blueprint for a Landscape (2017), a permanent installation for New York’s 96th Street Subway Station. In 2013, she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with Triple Point, a solo pavilion that marked an important evolution in her engagement with architecture, image and temporal structure. She has also developed large-scale commissions and site-responsive projects for institutions and civic spaces internationally.

Her work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2024); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2023); Storm King Art Center, New York (2021); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2021), with a new commission for the institution’s recently opened Jean Nouvel–designed building debuting in 2025; MOCA Toronto (2020); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017–18). Sze received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, and her work is held in major public collections including Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other institutions worldwide. She is a Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University

Photo: Deborah Feingold

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City. 

Photo: Chris Close