Fran Drescher, Alex Borstein, Kyra Sedgwick, Raney Aronson-Rath To Be Honored At NY Women In Film & Television Awards

Jill Goldsmith
·4 min read

EXCLUSIVE: SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, Kyra Sedgewick, Frontline’s Raney Aronson-Rath and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Alex Borstein will among those honored at the New York Women In Film & Television Muse Awards later this month.

Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of PBS Frontline, whose doc 20 Days in Mariupol won an Oscar Sunday, will receive the Enid Roth Award for Excellence in Journalism. The Made in NY Award from Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment will be presented to actress, writer, and producer and star of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Alex Borstein.

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Honorees also include actress Critics Choice Award and BAFTA Rising Star Award-nominated actress Millicent Simmonds (A Quiet Place), who will receive the Loreen Arbus Changemaker Award; Michèle Stephenson (Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project), a filmmaker, artist and author, awarded the Nancy Malone Directing Award.

Tantoon Cardinal (Killers Of The Flower Moon, Smoke Signals), and Latasha Gillespie, head of Global Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility for Amazon MGM Studios will also be honored.

The annual awards luncheon, set for March 27 at Cipriani 42nd Street, is the 44th editions of the organization’s flagship event. CBS Sunday Morning contributor, comedian, actress ?Nancy Giles? will serve as emcee.

“In a year, when Lily Gladstone the first Native American to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar – there is a drum beat we cannot miss – our industry is slowly transitioning and women are finally being recognized for their contributions,” said NYWIFT CEO Cynthia Lopez.

“After a tumultuous year in our industry marked by the reckoning of two strikes by creative workers, we’re excited to welcome the media community back to the Muse Awards to celebrate all that was accomplished through collective action this year,” added board president Leslie Fields-Cruz.

Drescher, a defender of women’s health, civil liberties, diversity and inclusion, is serving her second term as national president of SAG-AFTRA, the largest entertainment union in the world, after leading one of the longest strikes in the group’s history.

Borstein (who won an Emmy as Lois on long running animated Family Guy) starred as Susie Myerson in five seasons of filmed in New York Maisel, winning two Emmys. She starred for three seasons in HBO’s American version of the British series Getting On.

Aronson-Rath has grown PBS’ flagship investigative journalism series into a multi-platform organization, including expanding into theatrical documentaries that have earned multiple Academy Award ?nominations, including the win on Sunday.

Indigenous actress Cardinal is a SAG Award nominee who appeared most recently in Killers of the Flower Moon and Marvel series, Echo. She’s appeared in over 120 film and TV projects from Dances with Wolves to Legends of the Fall and Smoke Signals.

Sedgwick, last seen in Amazon series The Summer I Turned Pretty, just wrapped production on Connescence, written and directed by Michael J. Weithorn. She recently directed Space Oddity,starring Kyle Allen and Alexandra Shipp, and directed an episode of HBO’s upcoming The Girls on the Bus. Previous film roles include Singles, Phenomenon, The Game Plan, The Edge of Seventeen and Born on The Fourth Of July. 

Stephenson, a social justice lawyer with Haitian and Panamanian roots, focuses on narratives of resistance and identity centered on the experiences of communities of color in the Americas and the Black diaspora with Oscar-shortlisted  docs Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and short Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games). Her feature doc American Promise was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. She co-directed The Changing Same, a virtual reality trilogy series on racial terror Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Interactive Media Innovative category. She is currently in post-production on a feature on the Black Power movement in Canada.

Simmonds first emerged as the star of Todd Haynes’s film Wonderstruck opposite Julianne Moore. Upcoming projects include a series based on Sara Novíc’s novel, True Biz; portraying Helen Keller in Wash Westmoreland’s film Helen & Teacher; and the action thriller Ballerina Overdrive.

And Gillespie, head of DEI for Amazon MGM Studios, Prime Video and Freevee, created the entertainment industry’s first Inclusion playbook, which was standardized into the greenlight process.

Past recipients of MUSE awards include Sharon Stone (last year), Sandra Oh, Rashida Jones, Rachel Brosnahan, Gloria Estefan, Ann Dowd, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Mary-Louise Parker, Anne Sweeney, Martha Stewart, Robin Wright, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore, America Ferrera, Laura Dern, Julianna Margulies, Blythe Danner, Victoria Alonso, Gabourey Sidibe, Debi Mazar, Martha Plimpton, Cicely Tyson and Lucy Liu.

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