LOS ANGELES – Outfest, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization promoting equality by creating, sharing, and protecting LGBT stories on the screen, announced Friday that it will honor Golden Globe and two-time Emmy Award–winning writer-director Jill Soloway (“Transparent,” Afternoon Delight) and Freeform, the Disney|ABC Television Group network, at the 2016 Legacy Awards on Sunday, October 23rd.
Merrill Lynch will return as the Presenting Sponsor. This year’s awards dinner will once again take place at performing arts venue Vibiana in downtown Los Angeles, with head chef Neal Fraser (Redbird).
Soloway is receiving the Visionary Award, which recognizes artistic and creative contributions to LGBT media visibility, for her Emmy-winning series “Transparent” from Amazon Studios, the first scripted TV show to feature a lead transgender character, and for her contributions to “Six Feet Under” and “I Love Dick.”
Freeform will be honored with the Corporate Trailblazer Award in recognition of its groundbreaking programming for young adults, people in high school, college and the decade that follows which includes such LGBT-friendly programs including “Pretty Little Liars”, “The Fosters” and “Shadowhunters.”
“Jill Soloway has elevated the current transgender conversation like no one else and presents another facet of the LGBT family with dignity, honesty, and humor,” says Christopher Racster, Executive Director of Outfest. “There is no other network in the current landscape that is doing more to represent the current attitudes and philosophies of younger viewing audiences than Freeform. Their programming reflects that the path forward for so many young people today is not straight but one full of choices and options and recognizing that gives us all more equality and understanding.”
The Legacy Awards serves as a fundraiser to support the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, which celebrates its 11th anniversary this year. Outfest and UCLA Film & Television Archive partnered in 2005 to create the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, the only program in the world exclusively dedicated to saving and preserving LGBT moving images. The Legacy Project is aimed at the crisis in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender moving image archiving. Many of the landmark LGBT films produced over the last 40-plus years are already in danger of fading away; their original exhibition prints are in tatters and their negatives are in woeful storage conditions, or even lost. For the last 11 years, the Legacy Project is proud to have collected more than 36,000 moving image items and to have restored 24 historically important film and video projects.
Previous Legacy Award winners include Tom Hanks (Philadelphia), Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City), Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry), Lee Daniels (Empire), Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (Chicago) Adam Shankman (Hairspray), Roland Emmerich (Stonewall), Alan Poul (“The Newsroom”), Bruce Cohen (Silver Linings Playbook), and Paris Barclay (“Glee”).
Other sponsors for the night include: Brown-Forman, Delta Air Lines, Total Wine & More, and Variety.
Tickets are on sale now at www.outfest.org. Tables and tribute ads are on sale now. For information about tables, contact 213-480-7011 or thelegacyawards@outfest.org. For sponsorship and tribute journal ads, please contact Amy Flower at amy@outfest.org or 213-480-7095.
To buy tickets, please visit: http://bit.ly/2cAMuOp
