Feature: Academy Museum Gala To Honor Mky Lee, Steve McQueen, and Tilda Swinton
Images: (left) Miky Lee, photo by Tracy Kumono; (center) Steve McQueen, photo by John Russo; (right) Tilda Swinton, photo credit: Michael Lavine / CPi Syndication
LOS ANGELES, CA, March 16, 2022—The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures today announced details of its second annual gala, to be held on October 15, 2022. The Academy Museum Gala will celebrate the acclaimed new museum’s one-year anniversary and will honor Academy Museum Trustee and groundbreaking producer Miky Lee, Academy Award®-winning director, producer, and writer Steve McQueen, and Academy Award-winning actor Tilda Swinton.
The evening is being co-chaired by Academy Award-winning actor and Academy Museum supporter Halle Berry, Academy Museum Trustee and producer Jason Blum, and Academy Museum Trustee and screenwriter, director, producer Ryan Murphy, and Academy Award-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o. The evening is presented by Rolex and will raise vital funds to support the museum’s access, education, and programming initiatives. Rolex is also the official watch partner and founding supporter of the Academy Museum.
Bill Kramer, Director and President of the Academy Museum, said, “Our inaugural Gala in 2021 was a wonderful celebration of the artists and patrons of the Academy Museum. It was an incredible reminder of the power, artistry, diversity, and resilience of our film industry. At our 2022 Gala, we are deeply honored to recognize three members of our international film community whose outstanding achievements inspire us all: Miky Lee, Steve McQueen, and Tilda Swinton. We express our gratitude to Halle Berry, Jason Blum, Ryan Murphy, and Lupita Nyong’o for hosting this important evening and to Rolex for being a steadfast and engaged supporter of the Academy Museum Gala and global cinema.”
The three awards presented annually at the Academy Museum Gala reflect the museum’s mission to advance the understanding, celebration, and preservation of cinema and to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema.
The gala’s Vantage Award, honoring an artist or scholar who has helped to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema, will be given to Steve McQueen.
Tilda Swinton, an actress known for dedicating herself to collaborations with some of cinema’s most daring innovators, will receive the Visionary Award, honoring an artist or scholar whose extensive body of work has advanced the art of cinema.
Miky Lee will receive the gala’s Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum.
The 2021 Academy Museum Gala raised more than $11MM for museum's programming, educational, and access programs. Additional details about the 2022 Gala will be announced in the coming months.
ABOUT THE HONOREES
Miky Lee (Mie Kyung Lee) is vice chairwoman of South Korea’s CJ Group and is responsible for the overall strategic direction and management of the group’s entertainment and media subsidiary, CJ ENM. CJ ENM is the country’s foremost film and television studio, cable operator and music producer.
Lee earned her B.A degree at Seoul National University and received her M.A in Asian Studies from Harvard. In 1994, Lee founded the entertainment and media division of CJ and invested in DreamWorks SKG as one of the early investors. Since then, Lee has continued to strengthen CJ’s presence by leading the global phenomenon of the Korean cultural movement. In fact, she was the key driving force behind K-POP’s global success, creating and growing KCON, the world’s largest fan celebration of Korean culture and music.
Lee was on the Forbes Asia list of Asia’s 50 Power Businesswomen in 2012 and 2014. In 2017, Lee was named one of the founding Leadership Champions of the World Bank affiliated Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi).
CJ ENM has been involved in films such as Jung Ji-woo’s Happy End (1999), Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security. Area (2000), and Kang Woo-suk’s Silmido (2003). In 2019, Lee was executive producer of Parasite, the first foreign language film in history to win the Best Picture Oscar; she was later named The Hollywood Reporter’s International Producer of the Year in 2020. CJ ENM recently acquired the production-distribution company Endeavor Content.
Lee has been a Board Member of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures since 2019 and currently serves are the Board’s Vice Chair. She has been deeply supportive of the museum expansive AAPI film programming.
Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize and Academy Award-winning artist and filmmaker. In all of his work, McQueen is committed to telling deep and compelling truths that are often untold or overlooked.
In 2008, McQueen’s critically acclaimed first feature Hunger, a historical drama about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His second feature Shame, about the horrors of addiction, won two awards when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2011. His third film 12 Years A Slave, an adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 slave narrative memoir, received numerous prizes, most notably winning three Academy Awards including Best Picture. In 2018 he released Widows starring Viola Davis, who was nominated for a Best Actress BAFTA.
McQueen’s most recent project, Small Axe, is an anthology of five films which brings to life the experiences of London’s West Indian community. An unprecedented two of the films were selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. As well as being nominated for a Golden Globe, the series of films won L.A Film Critics Best Picture 2020. The anthology reflects the Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
McQueen is currently working on Occupied City, a new documentary that looks at Amsterdam under Nazi occupation during World War II.
Tilda Swinton’s cinematic resume is varied and growing. She has appeared in a multitude of films, starting in 1985 with Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. She and Jarman made seven more films together, including The Last of England, The Garden, War Requiem, Edward II (for which she won the Best Actress award at the 1991 Venice International Film Festival), and Wittgenstein, before Jarman’s death in 1994. She gained wider international recognition in 1992 with her portrayal of the title character in Orlando, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf and directed by Sally Potter.
She has established ongoing filmmaking relationships with, among others, Jim Jarmusch, Joel and Ethan Coen, Lynne Ramsay, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Bong Joon Ho. She has worked with Hungarian master Béla Tarr and with Judd Apatow. In 2020 she made the greatly acclaimed The Human Voice with Pedro Almodóvar.
Since 2008, she has curated bespoke film festivals, both in and around her home village in Scotland and internationally. Always intended to be unexpected and inspired by wonder and the enchantment of communal experience, these magical gatherings—informed by treasure hunts, children’s parties, and flash-mob spontaneity—are testament to her dedication to what she calls Big Cinema, to which she remains devoted.
She received both the BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress of 2008 for Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. In 2020, she was the recipient of both a BFI Fellowship and a Leone d’Oro at the Venice film festival for her lifetime’s work.
In 2021, Tilda Swinton’s work included Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Joanna Hogg’s Souvenir 2, and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. 2022 will see the premieres of George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing with Idris Elba, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, and Julio Torres’s untitled feature comedy with A24.
WHERE: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
PHOTOS: Courtesy of Academy Museum of Motion Pictures / GR8T Magazine
INSTAGRAM: Academy Museum
