Michael John Garcés and Dael Orlandersmith Receive 2020 Doris Duke Artist Awards for Excellence in Theater

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation today announced the names of the 2020 Doris Duke Artists, each receiving an award of $275,000 intended as an investment in and celebration of these artists and their ongoing contributions to the fields of contemporary dance, jazz and theater. A total of $250,000 of the prize is completely unrestricted, and $25,000 is dedicated to encouraging savings for retirement. The awards are not tied to specific projects; rather, they are available to artists to attend to important life needs that can help artists thrive. As one of many ways DDCF is upping its support to individual artists in response to the impacts of Covid-19 on the arts sector, the foundation is expanding the number of artists receiving Doris Duke Artist Awards to a total of eight for 2020, up from six the previous year.

Michael John Garcés and Dael Orlandersmith received awards for their continuing excellence in theater. Additionally, Ana María Alvarez, Sean Dorsey, Rennie Harris and Pam Tanowitz were awarded for their contributions to the field of dance, and Andrew Cyrille and Cécile McLorin Salvant each received awards in recognition of their work in the field of jazz. With the 2020 awards, DDCF has awarded nearly $10.2 million to 37 artists in the field of theater since 2012.

"The work of this year's Doris Duke Artist Award recipients is profoundly inspiring and brings vibrancy, insight, gravity and light to the world," said Ed Henry, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. "We believe that the arts are critically important to the well-being of our nation, and at the heart of the arts is the individual artist. We take great pride in supporting these outstanding artists as they continue to develop and share their talent."

"The 2020 class of Doris Duke Artists consists of an extraordinary set of creative visionaries, and we are thrilled to award them with this support," said Maurine Knighton, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. "Each of them has earned this well-deserved recognition, as attested to by a body of their peers through an incredibly rigorous nomination and review. Our intent for this award has always been to enable its recipients to invest in their own well-being in ways that create the right conditions for them to continue to flourish and do their best work. Amid a year like no other in recent memory, the importance of this aim should be readily apparent to all."

"Being aware of the Doris Duke Artist Award and having worked with and experienced the work of many extraordinary awardees in the past, I was and am extremely aware of the honor this confers," said Garcés. "Receiving this award in this time of acute uncertainty, profound change, intense hope in the movement towards freedom and reckoning with our history, is overwhelming. I feel renewed, reinvigorated - visible in a way that is renovating. As I enter a new phase as an artist and maker, this award frees me to make decisions that are not wholly concessions to pressing practical considerations and to more fully engage in the making of work that is radically vulnerable."

"Getting the award has changed my life," said Orlandersmith. "I want to thank whoever nominated me and the people on the panel that recommended me for the award. I am eternally grateful, and I send lovelight to you. I am currently moving amid this pandemic and going through the gorgeous, frustrating, painful, and ultimately beautiful process of sorting my things and my life, while also writing in the throes of this. It's a period of self-investigation and transformation."

To read more about the Doris Duke Artist Awards and the 2020 Doris Duke Artists, visit www.dorisdukeartistawards.org.

About the Doris Duke Artist Awards:

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation designed the Doris Duke Artist Awards to invest in exemplary individual artists in contemporary dance, jazz and theater work who have demonstrated their artistic vitality and ongoing commitment to their field. The award is not a lifetime achievement award. Rather, it is a deep investment in the creative potential of dedicated artists. The foundation aims to empower Doris Duke Artists through the freedom of unrestricted support to take creative risks, explore new ideas, and pay for important professional and personal needs not typically funded by the project-related grants that dominate arts funding. While the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation initially conceived the Doris Duke Artists Awards as part of a larger $50 million special initiative that finished in 2017, recognition of the program's importance in helping artists thrive spurred the foundation to cement a place for the flexible awards in its core strategy to support the arts. With the 2020 class, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation will have awarded nearly $33.5 million to 122 noteworthy artists through the Doris Duke Artist Awards since May 2012.